The Dark Matter
by Atropos Snipping
Summary: When Dumbledore entrusts Hermione with a mission in the summer between her third and fourth year, she finds herself shacked up in the shadows with her Potions professor, wound up in Time and tripping over her morals. AU after Prisoner of Azkaban. Eventual HG/SS.
1. CHAPTER ONE – LOOP

**Summary: **Hermione is wound up in Time, and tripping over her morals. When Dumbledore entrusts Hermione with her own mission in the summer between her third and fourth year, she finds herself caught in the shadows with the unlikeliest of men. AU after Prisoner of Azkaban. Eventual HG/SS.

**General Disclaimer**: I have no beta, so all errors are my own. All publically recognisable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended. This story starts relatively tame here, but I'm expecting serious and frank dabbling in the Dark Arts, and lots of moral quandaries, which is why the story is rated M. Expect to have profanity, discussion of domestic violence, rape, and sexually explicit acts. Please read at your own discretion.

* * *

_Just as the human mind cannot comprehend time,_  
_so it cannot comprehend the damage that will ensue_  
_if we presume to tamper with its laws._

— Professor Saul Croaker, Unspeakable

* * *

**CHAPTER ONE**

**LOOP**

* * *

It was half an hour to curfew and Hermione was both working on the last of her Arithmancy homework for the summer in the Gryffindor common room, and running her fingers over the gold chain of her Time-Turner in the second-floor girl's lavatory. Last year, this was the cubicle in which she'd emerged with a tail and whiskers – perhaps one her greatest failures to date – where Moaning Myrtle had dragged Professor Snape and Madam Pomfrey to bear witness to such disaster. And because Hermione preferred to think of life as a palimpsest, to rewrite over entire sections until the trauma blurred into one grey murk, this was also the site she'd designated to be her Fiasco Room.

This was to be her final tinkering in time, she was certain of that.

In approximately five minutes, the Hermione she _was_ would leave her homework and take her place in the cubicle beside her own, knock thrice on the dividing board, and she, the present version, would emerge after a minute's silence. The routine, the structure, was essential to her continued success – every lunchtime, in the minutes after lunch, and in the final half-hour before curfew Hermione would perform her Adjustments, sometimes saving a Hufflepuff from clutches of older Slytherins with jinxes thrown from the shadows, or leaving under her pillow rolls of parchments that detailed the contents of surprise quizzes in Arithmancy and obscure ingredients in Potions that she'd never heard of. Perfection came at the cost of her rudimentary moralities, but she, with her Time-Turner, was entrusted to locate the boundaries and skirt them should she wish.

Just this past month she had rescued Sirius Black from the clutches of the Dementors, saved a hippogriff from slaughter, and managed to get Outstandings in every single assignment for the year; even Potions, a subject in which she'd maintained a steady Exceeds Expectations, had finally succumbed – this was sometimes down to vast amounts of Time-Turning, the cost of which were migraines that lasted days, and a stomach that was always pumped empty. Despite Dumbledore's and McGonagall's warnings, she'd turn the maximum hours back, and then again when she arrived, maybe even a third time, turn after turn, rewriting her homework with the aid of Snape's acerbic red scrawl in the margins of her essays, and then carefully switching them in her bag before she handed them in; often she hid under disillusion charms in this same cubicle, until it was time to resume her place in her timeline. Myrtle paid her little attention, the ghost having relocated to the Prefect's Bathroom these days.

Hermione's fingers continued to stroke the chain, and she was once again attempting to count the specks of enchanted sand in the, flowing between the chambers. Once, on a particularly uneventful bout of Adjusting, she had witnessed that for every minute four grains of sand would pass, and thus all Ministry certified Time-Turners, contained 240 specks, and it would take 1200 (five complete turns) to max out one ride. But upon arrival, you need only wait until the nausea had passed to begin turning back again – at your own peril, of course, and Hermione was well-used to peril.

She heard her own steady footsteps, the sobs. 'Stupid, stupid, stupid. There's no need to be so sentimental. No need.' The latch of the door. Her weight falling atop the toilet, the clatter of the seat. _Knock. Knock. Knock_. 'Goodnight, Hermione!' she heard, her own voice sounding so alien and foreign.

'Good luck, Hermione!' she replied.

* * *

Morning came. It was the final day of term, an entirely blank canvas, and Hermione had an appointment straight after breakfast with Professor Dumbledore. She planned to return the Time-Turner, but Hermione woke to see a scrap of parchment peeking out from under her pillow, and she groaned loudly. Her roommates shuffled in their beds.

'Sorry!' it said, in her own loopy handwriting. 'It will all make sense. Turn after meeting.'

Hermione reached for her wand. 'Incendio,' she said, and she was holding soft ash.

In her fury, she jumped out of bed, the cloaked Time-Turner warm against her skin, and headed to the bathroom to sort herself out. When she entered the bathroom, Parvati Patel was already stood with her hair wrapped in a towel massaging some sweet-smelling lotion into her cheeks, and she smiled at Hermione but they did not speak. Parvati and herself had a muted sort of friendship that was shown in gestures like sharing shampoo and sometimes pouring one another tea at breakfast. Every September Hermione would promise herself that she would get to know the girls in her dorm, and every year she was bogged down with more homework, more existentially troubling circumstances than she knew what to do with. Perhaps the Time-Turner could be invested here, here where she was so woefully lacking in female comradery – she thought on this for the entirety of her shower, and then sighed knowing that it would probably remain another unfulfilled resolution.

Stepping out, pink-skinned and raw, Hermione almost walked into Lavender Brown, dressed in a cherry red bra and shorts, who sneered and pushed past her. Lavender had begun to menstruate this spring, and thus was firmly the alpha female of the dorm – which was fine with Hermione, for in her trio she was decidedly mother enough, period or no period, flat-chested or not; she glanced down at the front of her camisole where there seemed, for the first time in her memory, something identifiably breast-like.

'About time,' she said, knowing that she was ageing a lot faster than her classmates and would continue to do so. In the mirror, the girl who looked back was her but sickly. The pink flush from her shower had faded, her eyes were sunken and dark. The inner reflected the outer. She felt like a sheet of filo pastry her mother insisted on making at home, stretched so thin and fine, that she could probably read _Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts_ through it – or, in her mother's case, _The Guardian_ newspaper.

After dressing and packing up the remainder of her luggage, Hermione headed down to the final breakfast of her third year. Last night at the feast Gryffindor had won the House Cup, and the banners were still up – everything warm-toned and mellow, everything she would miss over the summer. She spooned herself a ladle full of porridge and ate, watching the students trickle in through the doors, dragging their feet, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. At head table sat Professor Snape, leafing through a journal; he met her eye immediately, and she grinned recalling her Outstanding, and he looked to incline his head at her in some form of greeting or acknowledgement, but was probably just getting back to his book. Professor Dumbledore was stood beside the ghost and History of Magic teacher Binns, the two talking loudly on the historic abuses of dragon by the goblins. Professor Sinistra, the Astronomy lecturer, had her head turned to the enchanted ceiling but her eyes shut, one hand stirred her tea, the other whizzing across parchment.

When she was about to help herself to a second serving of porridge Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley arrived, her closest friends, but Dumbledore smiled from head table, getting to his feet.

Hermione stood too. 'I'll probably see you two on the train,' she said. 'I'm meeting with Professor Dumbledore before I head down there myself.'

'About what?' asked Ron, dunking a slice of buttered toast into his tea. Harry lightly elbowed him, and nodded to Hermione, eyebrows raised. 'Oh!' said Ron, catching on, chewing the sodden bread. 'Do you have to? Can't you just—'

'We've talked about this, Ron. It was always the plan.' And then she waved and sped off to catch up with Dumbledore, the man moving rather quickly for someone who'd lived longer than a century.

'Ah, Miss Granger,' he said when she fell into step with him. 'Lovely day isn't it?' Hermione frowned, looking to the ashen skies, aware of her shirt sticking to her back in the muggy heat. 'I expect quite a storm.'

'Yes, Professor. I think so too.' And then, after a beat of silence and remembering the topic of his conversation with Binns, she asked, 'Do you think there may be uses for dragon's blood that you've not discovered yet?'

Dumbledore chuckled. 'Why do you ask?'

Hermione smiled, always a little self-conscious in the company of intellectuals. 'It's only that . . . I gifted my father a vial of Norwegian Ridgeback blood at Christmas—for the sheer novelty of it, you understand—and he . . . Professor, he suggested that the viscosity and scent was rather like petrol, which got me thinking.'

'Go on . . .'

'Well, I wondered whether you've considered dragon's blood as a potential fuel substitute . . . ? Their fire does not erupt from nothingness, and has more uses than oven cleaner, I feel.'

Dumbledore looked down at the girl, contemplative, and rested a hand on her shoulder as they came to the entrance of his office. 'Sesame Spindles,' he said, and gestured her to walk on up ahead. 'Miss Granger, that line of research may serve to be rather fertile. It's always seemed too obvious to take seriously, but it remains untapped.'

'It seems logical,' she said, 'they breathe fire, after all! And muggles use petrol and petrol derivatives for absolutely everything!'

'Miss Granger,' he said, taking a seat behind his office, and gesturing her to do the same in the opposite upholstered chair, 'you must understand that, unlike the muggle world, the wizarding world has entrusted fire to a select few: the alchemists, the potions masters, the persevering candle, and the Floo, dragons to their keepers in the East. Fire scorches, and good salve is hard to come by.' Fawkes chirped from his stand, and Hermione looked to the bird, wondering what strange magic tied the Dumbledores to such rare and entrancing creatures. 'Yes, the phoenixes. Their fire belongs to rebirth alone.'

'Professor,' she said, frowning, 'I have read something along those lines . . .'

'It would be most fascinating if you have.'

_Oh._

An image of herself handling a book with her dragonskin gloves came to mind: she was sitting in the dark of the Restricted Section in a bout of curfew Adjustment last winter, hidden under the strongest cloaking spell she knew, and reading by a dim _lumos_. The book in question was _The Nightshade Guide to Necromancy_, not your usual third-year spell book – indeed, no book for a school at all; it detailed the arduous process of creating all manner of necrotic beings, some like the Inferi, corpses reanimated and mindless, dancing to the whim of any witch or wizard with enough mettle to conjure them. Voldemort, at the height of his power, had created a legion of Inferi that laid dormant and in his control to this day – or so was the rumour. Hermione had read in the introduction to _The Nightshade Guide_, penned by an ancestor of Professor Dumbledore named Belladonna, that the darkest magics known in the world were Horcrux-making—something Hermione had never heard mentioned in any book the School library held—and the harnessing of phoenix fire, 'for it belonged to their rebirth alone'. 'To suspend such an unpolluted and chaste creature in the amber of pain,' Belladonna wrote, 'was the greatest sin.'

'In the _Nightshade Guide_,' she said. 'It was written by your—'

'Five times great grandmother on my father's side,' he said, staring at her over his half-moon spectacles. 'A remarkable witch, by all accounts.'

'Was she not a dark witch, Professor?'

Dumbledore beamed. 'Miss Granger,' he said, 'Hermione'—she felt the heat rise in her cheeks at the grandfatherly ease at which he said her name—'the two are hardly mutually exclusive. Dark wizards do the most extraordinary things.' As Dumbledore spoke, several paintings in his office huffed and exclaimed, affronted. 'We live in the long shadow of their gall, and by the determination of those who stand against them.'

'Like you stood against Grindelwald?'

It was Dumbledore's cheeks that turned ruddy now, and he shuffled in his seat, rearranging his heavily embroidered lavender robes. 'Perhaps, perhaps. Have you decided on the fate of your Time-Turner, my dear?'

Hermione unclasped it from behind her neck and held the weightless hourglass in her hand. The sand lay unperturbed, unmoving. Logically, she knew that she'd somehow hold on to it – she had received that note from her future self, of course, but she'd yet to find out why. Surely, researching another use for dragon's blood was not enough. There must be something else.

'I keep it,' she said, looking up at the pensive man. 'I don't know why; it's brought me nothing but nervousness this year, I am positively barmy, Professor. But I keep it for some reason.'

'And how have you come to know this?'

'I left—_will leave_—myself a note.'

Dumbledore nodded but was still contemplative, the wringing of his hands the only thing giving away his frustration. 'Hermione,' he said. 'you're interacting with yourself. This is . . . unorthodox. We talked about the risk.'

Hermione shook her head vehemently. 'No, no,' she said. 'I, I never make mistakes. And I never _really_ interact with myself.'

'But you do on some level?'

She thought to this morning. 'It's the self-fulfilling prophecy, Professor. I never go back in time and change events, acting for entirely different future – I don't know how to do that!' She had the acute sense that she had told a fib to the Headmaster, but she couldn't pin it down. When Dumbledore had asked her to save Sirius and Buckbeak, she had gone back in time with Harry to explicitly change those events. But she was always going to do this. She had caught a glimpse of her own hair. On that day, two Hermiones (and two Harrys) were conspiring against the Minister and the axe-wielder McNair – one in ignorant past, and one from the future. She hated thinking on the loops of time, on how many instances she had crossed her own timeline, and divulging this to Dumbledore was not an intelligent move. She wondered even now about what the future Hermione was doing in this timeline; she had left her the note this morning, but would she camp out until noon in Myrtle's bathroom? 'It's the self-fulfilling prophecy,' she said again.

'But you understand what's just happened here, child?' Dumbledore's voice raised the hair on her arms, made gooseflesh erupt on the nape of her neck. 'By telling me that you keep the Time-Turner, we are propelled towards realising that future. I cannot take it from you. You must keep it if only to go back and give yourself that note.'

'I know,' Hermione groaned, dropping her face into her hands, mortified. 'I understand.'

'And do you regret it?'

She looked up at Dumbledore, who was as serious as ever. His eyes belied no mirth. The portraits were silent. Fawkes was staring. The dull roar of the schoolchildren in the castle, stilted. 'Do I regret what, Headmaster?'

'Bearing the burden of Time?'

'Not at all,' she answered quickly. 'It's no burden.'

'So, you could stand more?'

'Of course,' she said, unthinking. 'Of course.'

'In that case,' he said, getting to his feet with a muffled groan, coming around to her side of the desk and offering her a handful of lemon sherbets, 'I have a proposition for you.'

* * *

**Author's Note: **Lots of timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly stuff in this opening chapter. I will attempt to upload as and when I can. I have plans for you readers! Oh, do I have plans!


	2. CHAPTER TWO – THE GREATER GOOD

_Time present and time past_  
_Are both perhaps present in time future,_  
_And time future contained in time past._  
_If all time is eternally present_  
_All time is unredeemable._  
_What might have been is an abstraction_  
_Remaining a perpetual possibility_  
_Only in a world of speculation._  
_What might have been and what has been_  
_Point to one end, which is always present._

— T. S. Eliot, _Burnt Norton_

* * *

**CHAPTER TWO**

**THE GREATER GOOD**

* * *

In the Fiasco Room sat Hermione, waiting for herself.

She had spent the better part of the morning hidden beneath her own bed in Gryffindor tower. A serious misjudgement on how quickly she'd rouse herself with shoving a quick note under a pillow led to her diving beneath the single four-poster cot. Hermione thanked Lavender's stellar knowledge of household charms when all she encountered were the clean floors – not a mote of dust nor house spider in sight, no stray sock or hair clip. It was times like these she became acutely aware of the gaps in her magical education, jolted awake, suffering the reality of being a muggleborn witch. In some fantasies with the Time-Turner, in some daydreams in toilet cubicles, Hermione imagined a world where she could turn back years and live out school again, claiming she was a long-lost pureblood witch just so she'd never hear some Slytherin whisper _mudblood _in her wake – sometimes, she would deign to put aside her pride.

And then, a muffled groan, a whispered spell. Hermione watched her own bony feet dart out of the room, turn left at the door towards the girls' communal baths.

It was an hour later, at nine o'clock when the dorm was finally clear. The rest of the girls had got dressed and had headed down to breakfast, but would be coming back soon enough to do the remainder of their packing. In that window of time, Hermione _disillusioned _herself and crept out of the common room, heading straight for the safety of her Fiasco Room where she'd wait until 11.35. There were still hours to go, but she needed the time to ruminate on her long, meandering conversation with Dumbledore . . .

* * *

'I have a proposition for you,' said Dumbledore, pressing seven lemon sherbets into her hands, which she pocketed. 'I am certain you're well-placed for the task, all I need is your cooperation.'

Hermione's tongue was pressed firmly to the roof of her mouth, her jaw clenched tight. She found herself breathing quick. 'This is what faith feels like,' she thought, 'this is the weight of responsibility.' And, 'What must I do?' she said.

Dumbledore smiled, and walked to where Fawkes sat upon his perch, the two sharing a long look. 'Ever since you and Harry saved Sirius, I've been thinking. I have thought for many hundreds of hours, in fact, on whether we—you, I, even poor Harry who knew not what he was getting himself into—whether we committed some grave error.'

Hermione blinked quickly, fear settling into the pit of her stomach, her teeth audibly grinding against one another, gnashing in her tightly closed mouth. 'Of course,' she thought, recollecting all the hours that she herself had questioned the very act, not knowing—not even now—whether it was right, yet believing that it was always to play out the way it had. 'How do you mean?'

Dumbledore was silent, staring still at Fawkes. The moment his eyes flickered to Hermione the bird burst into flames. The Headmaster stepped back from the blaze, his face warmed by the heat and glow. Hermione was at her feet before she knew it, standing beside the man. Fawkes, as if he were a strand of hair, burned fleetingly – that awful fire, brilliant ochre – alight for only a handful of seconds; she thought to Belladonna's words, knowing now just how dark a spell or ritual must be to capture and bottle something so ephemeral. After a stagnant moment, life rumbled from the ash, and the bird grew from the char and nothingness. '_This_,' Hermione thought, 'was true magic.'

'I have been thinking,' said Dumbledore, tickling Fawkes' mustard-coloured beak, 'whether we have upset the tricksy balance of the universe with our meddling. Or maybe, if I am to share the more terrible of these ruminations with you on this morning, Hermione, whether our job wasn't to just save a life, but to equalise the scales by taking another . . . for the greater good, you understand.'

She felt the old man's eyes watching her now, waiting for some spark of fury or offence, but Hermione felt too numb to react. The greater good – how many lives had already been taken, how many witches and wizards had died for those words? 'I think,' said Hermione, her voice as steady as she could manage, 'in the name of the greater good, we have already lost too much.'

The wizard winced. 'And how much of this . . . _philosophy _do you know, Hermione? Are you familiar with its origins?'

'I know enough,' she said. 'About Gellert Grindelwald, that is.' She met Dumbledore's eyes, and there was something there that made her add, 'But perhaps not all you do, Professor, you being the one who . . . put an end to him and his rule.' Dumbledore's eyes twinkled with a dark mirth that almost made the girl shiver – she could not imagine the old man hurting so much as a fly, but in moments like this (of which there had been decidedly few) she could see why Dark witches and wizards the world over feared him. 'Is there something I _should _know?' she asked. 'Of those origins?'

Dumbledore went back around to his desk, leaving the newborn Fawkes. Hermione resumed her place on the other side, eyes flitting over the organised chaos on the surface: littered with all manner of stationery and tomes.

'Gellert and I,' said Dumbledore, 'were friends, long before we stood against one another.' When she made to speak, Dumbledore raised a hand to stay her. 'It's best if I get this out together, Hermione, your questions may be answered . . . I met Gellert at eighteen, in 1899, he was a little younger than I, but a man possessed with notions of glory, nonetheless, even then. He was staying at Godric's Hollow—forever a sight of the most fearful deeds in Wizarding history—with his great-aunt, the famous historian and author of _A History of Magic_, Bathilda Bagshot. A wonderful witch, and though I'm hardly one to speak on such matters, very near the end of her life.

'We had long impassioned conversations, Gellert and I, about our fear of forever leading lives in secrecy. Because we, in our naïve youth, believed that the muggles would benefit greatly if we were to . . . guide them . . . Which is perhaps a rather inappropriate way of describing our craving to rule like kings over the muggles,' he said rather quickly, the words spilling forth as if a tap had been tugged on. 'We were barely older than yourself, Hermione, but those were times that innocence was stripped bitterly and quickly. Our awful pasts left us impressionable to Dark thought and spells.

'And you cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, inflamed me. Muggles forced into subservience. We wizards triumphant. Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution. Oh, I had scruples. I assuaged my conscience with empty words. It would all be for the greater good, and any harm done would be repaid a hundredfold in benefits for wizards. Did I know in my heart of hearts, what Gellert Grindelwald was? I think I did, but I closed my eyes. If the plans we were making came to fruition, all my dreams would come true.*

'But Gellert and I would not be so friendly for long . . . My siblings—yes, it is always a matter of great surprise—Aberforth, who now lives and works in Hogsmeade and I see so rarely, and Ariana my dearest sister who I see but through the film of sleep . . . Miss Granger'—Dumbledore leaned forward in his chair, staring at the bewildered Hermione with watery eyes—'she was rather like you at one point, so brimming with life, so intelligent, so wise even in her brief childhood, cruelly snatched. Aberforth, one evening, overheard Gellert and I speaking, sensed the _ardour _between us, and he, who had so recently seen our father succumbed by his own hatred of muggles, could not abide it. In that inevitable quarrel, in that terrible duel, Ariana lost her life. Gellert fled, taking our senseless and misplaced philosophies with him, using them to wreak havoc for decades.'

Hermione felt like crying, feeling as if she'd been both betrayed and saved by the man in front of her. Knowing, that if it were not for him, perhaps Grindelwald may not have taken up his Dark mantle, and if it were not for Dumbledore, Grindelwald would still be at large today. And so much of Voldemort's own thinking was just in the vein of Grindelwald, a repurposing, a honing. She was sat in front of the man who had incensed them both.

'You must have many questions,' said Dumbledore, sitting back in his seat, his clasped hands pressed to his chin, and he watched her carefully as he spoke.

'Too many,' she agreed, clearing the lump in her throat. 'But perhaps the most pertinent for the moment, and the least prying to my mind is—.' She paused for a moment, the words a muddle in her brain, wanting to know more about Grindelwald and the Headmaster's _arduous _relationship, the exact reason for Ariana's killing, but knowing that this was perhaps not the best time. 'I think, Professor, having travelled so often in time this year—though by no means an expert, of course—I have been doing some reading, both muggle and magic, on time. And honestly? I'm just not convinced that time works in the way the wizarding world thinks.'

Dumbledore barked out a laugh. Hermione jumped in her seat. 'And how do you suppose time works, Hermione?' he asked, mirth shining in his eyes, his voice laced with some cousin feeling of condescension.

She frowned. 'Muggle physics cannot know for certain but . . . _I think _it works in a closed loop,' she said. 'On the day that we saved Buckbeak and Sirius, I recall a brief moment . . . where, I could have sworn, Professor, I saw myself! Briefly. By Hagrid's pumpkins. Just a glimpse of my face in the trees. I didn't know I would go back, _obviously_—I never get this feeling now, because I'm always telling myself when I should be travelling that day. But later, when Harry and I Turned, I saw the same scene play out again . . . I saw my past self in my own present, look back and briefly see _me_. It was always bound to happen that way.' She nodded furiously, speaking faster and faster, breathless by the end. Who was Hermione convincing? Herself, or Dumbledore, or the portraits? She didn't know.

'You're making the case for predestination rather well, my child.'

'Predestination,' said Hermione, tasting the word in her mouth. 'Yes. Yes, that is what I believe.'

'So, you believe in the magic of muggles.'

'_Pardon_?'

'Religion,' Dumbledore clarified, smiling. 'The Abrahamic faith is rife with these magics, the magic of faith. My own mother was quite the enthusiast.'

'This conversation is taking an odd turn,' Hermione thought. 'I'm not a devout believer,' she said, 'but I've attended Church with my parents, who are now Quakers. And once I visited a mosque in Birmingham on a primary school trip, which was a moving experience at such a young age . . . But whether I believe in God or not is still up in the air, so to speak, Professor.'

Dumbledore was looking at her strangely now, as if with a niggling of doubt, as if she had corrupted herself further with such attitudes – there was always the matter of her blood she would have to contend with, though Dumbledore being a half-blood himself and champion of the muggleborns would be the last person to hold it against her. Once, in her first year at Hogwarts, Hermione had come across something rather base written in a Muggle Studies textbook, describing Religion as squib basterdization, a pathetic attempt at true magic; she was taught it at face-value, as if it were fact. She remembered the indignant look of the other muggleborn students, their waving hands of protest in the classroom; she remembered the tears in Pavarti's eyes who, though pureblood, was a strict Hindu: it was an insult. The experiential magics, the magic that was taught at Hogwarts, channelling the inner spark through the wand cores, and translating that urge through Latin spells, had always been at odds with her mind to the dogma and introspection of religion. However, there was something to be said for the hundreds gathered in pews reading hymns, or the hundreds of thousands that circled around Mecca, that felt like it was reaching towards an actual magical ritual; anything would be answered, should you say the right words, have the right intentions.

'Once,' said Hermione soberly, 'multitudes in the past, we set ourselves on this course. Predestination, kismet, are often used interchangeably with a perceived lack of agency, an afront on our free will, but I like to remind myself rather often that I'm in charge. And in any case, these theories are perpetuated by the religious and secular alike – there is no place for gut-feelings and hope in hard science.'

Dumbledore chuckled. 'You are wise beyond your years,' he said, 'and your words soothe me more than I can say.' Hermione blushed. 'But still, I don't believe you've asked the most important question.'

She nodded, knowing that she'd been skirting it long enough. 'Though I disagree with the premise,' she said, 'because I don't believe in restoring balance for the greater good, I can think of at least one person who we should have focused on that day . . . who we should have got, had we thought of it.'

'And who might that be?'

'Peter Pettigrew,' she said.

'Peter Pettigrew,' Dumbledore echoed. 'Indeed. When I spoke to Harry that night, he told me of a prophecy delivered that same day to him by Professor Trelawney.' Hermione scoffed, and the Headmaster smiled, but something in her eyes stopped her for any further derision. 'She made a prediction: before midnight, the servant would break free and set out to re-join his master, and the Dark Lord would rise again with that servant's aid, greater and more fearsome than her ever was.'

'And you believe she's an actual seer?' Hermione sniggered, the image of the kooky professor solid in her mind, her whole subject an utter waste of all the time she turned to attend the classes.

Dumbledore was no longer smiling. 'This is not a matter of belief, Hermione. I know she is.' The girl grew silent, her heart in her throat. When she opened her mouth to question it further, Dumbledore shook his head. 'I cannot explain now, my dear, but know it's true. Sybil is, ironically enough, a true clairvoyant – though her prophesies infrequent . . . It is virtually impossible now to stop the first part of her prophecy, the servant—Pettigrew, of course—has broken free, and soon enough he will find and re-join his master. We have a small and undetermined window of time between then and now, and the only person I know on the side of the Light who can prolong that, sits before me this morning.'

* * *

Hermione's task, seemingly impossible to her mind still, was to find some way to track Peter Pettigrew's movements; a man who had spent twelve long years parading as an actual rat familiar to the Weasley brothers, who had pulled off one of the greatest cons in recent history by framing Sirius Black for the death of the Potters, and she was tasked to find him as if he was going to turn up at the Leakey Cauldron any time soon and offer to pay the tab for everyone present. It was an impossible assignment, and the only thing she had on her side was her Time-Turner, and apparently a library at her disposal.

That latter point was the most startling of all the revelations from that conversation. Hermione was going to have a library full of books. A library. And Dumbledore had handed her what seemed like her weight in galleons to buy anything else she may need. The location of said library she was to find out later, but by the twinkle in the Headmaster's eyes, she knew that it would be no paradise.

Hermione pulled out some parchment from her bag and began writing a letter to her parents, jotting down her excuses for not making it back this summer. Using words like 'fantastic opportunity' and 'future career prospects' and 'held in scholarly regard'. These were buzzwords, of course, but shorthand for her parents who, though were academics in their own rights, were always a little surprised when she came home with a glowing report card. But knowing her words were probably not enough, Dumbledore had confirmed that he'd be asking Professor McGonagall to pay her parents a visit this evening to assuage and allay all their trepidations. To the Granger parents, Hermione would be attending summer school in the depths of the Black Lake with the merepeople, at the only underwater academy in this hemisphere – she felt terrible telling them such a wild fiction, but Dumbledore was rather excited about using the story, as if he had spent rather a long time ironing out the nuance of it all.

All that was left at that point was for Hermione to tie her Time-Turner back around her neck, do all her necessary Turning, and meet the Headmaster back in his office once the coast was clear. She would not be saying goodbye to Ron or Harry, after all, lamenting the passing of another school year.

'For me,' she thought, 'it has been an entire year.' Indeed, with her additional ten hours of turning every day, she would be adding three more days to her week, a month of almost forty days. And for every three months she had aged four. By the end of the school year, Hermione had calculated (with even her most conservative estimates), she'd pushed back her birthday by a whole year – the thought turned her stomach. So, this September she would not turn fifteen but sixteen.

_Sixteen._

Over her robes, Hermione cupped the breast she'd noticed earlier in the day. She imagined her mother, Jean, taking her to Marks & Spencer and picking out an entirely utilitarian beige bra in the smallest size, thrusting it towards her. She would wear it and she would feel almost a woman. She would go home and walk around her room in her boring bra. She, with the curtains drawn, may even dance. Hermione, sitting in the damp bathroom, hearing the voices of her schoolmates grow quieter, thinking on Professor Trelawny's prophecy and her mission for Dumbledore, knew that there was every likelihood of her never seeing that bedroom ever again, but she resolved to at least the attempt.

* * *

**Author's Note**: Thanks for taking the time to read! Do review if you have the time, and make sure to follow the story should you like to be notified of when it uploads next – I shall try to be as quick as I can. Until then, dear readers!

* Albus Dumbledore to Harry Potter, Chapter 22, _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban _


	3. CHAPTER THREE - DISAPPARATE

**CHAPTER THREE**

**[DIS]APPARATE**

* * *

It was 12.05 p.m. and Hermione still sat in her cubicle. She'd heard the footsteps, the slamming shut of the door, the knocking, the breathing halt in the space beside her. But in the half-hour or so that had passed, she was remiss to muster up the courage to meet Dumbledore. He'd said that he would be departing from the grounds at exactly half-past noon, and she was to meet him and her summer landlord by the stairs which led up to his office. But every minute spent here in her dank haven, where she hadn't formally walked into an arrangement she'd regret, was a minute of virtue. Beyond this space, in the summer realm, every second she spent in her search for Pettigrew would be a second she was betting against Voldemort's return. Time had never been so precious. Time had never been so fickle.

Six minutes later, Hermione got to her feet. Her head swimming as she did, black floaters sparking across her eyes: head rush; she'd read in multiple books on magical time theory, that extended travel would manifest physically, and one of those signs was anemia. The wizarding world had over-the-counter potions to cure this—she'd seen the Metal Moste Momentary potion advertised in the apothecary window in Hogsmeade, supposedly perfecting the body's balance of iron, copper, and manganese—but Hermione had used the last of her Knuts to order Harry some shirts from Madam Malkins to take home, believing money wouldn't be much of an issue come the end of June, and Harry's muggle clothes were looking more than a little threadbare—though, of course, he would never admit to these things. Just as she got to her feet and the dizziness passed, Hermione became conscious of the weight of the pouch of gold in her pocket, and she remembered that money was suddenly no object. 'Was this the price of a clean conscious,' she thought, 'or a burdened one?'

Hermione looked down to the bags at her feet. The trunk was filled with books padded with her winter jumpers and socks, and two linen totes piled high with her neatly folded clothes and robes. She had been researching some kind of magic-efficient way to travel, and all signs were pointing towards an Undetectable Extension charm. Now was as good a time as any to try, and she had just the bag. Her mother, before sending her off to school last September, had bequeathed to her two bags: one, a squat purple beaded affair which was pretty but would draw unnecessary attention if she began pulling leather-bound hardback books out in public, the second a wide, attractive satchel in leather tanned so dark it was almost black. She tugged out the bag from her trunk, emptied it of any loose parchment, and cleaned it with a quick _scourgify_, followed with a _tergeo_ for good measure.

With her back against the door, she set the bag atop the closed lid of the toilet. She tugged her vine wood wand from her robe pocket, and with a stiff wrist, angling the wand to the ceiling created a sharp cyclone of magic. All the research she'd done had insisted that this charm, rather like most charms, was highly temperamental: the more magic you channelled, the more powerful your results, and she wanted a space at least as big as the Great Hall. _At least_. 'Capacious extremis,' she said clearly, thrusting the tip of her wand at the bag, holding an image of the hall in her mind, envisaging its proportions as clearly as she could – a ladder to climb down, shelves aplenty, herringbone floors, a triple-height ceiling. The tempest, bathed now in lavender light, engulfed her bag. The emerald silk which lined it grew discoloured at the edges, where it had been sewn into the leather, but aside from that, nothing seemed too much different when the light faded. Picking it up, it seemed a little lighter – a good indicator, since part of the spell was a mass-reduction Feather-Light.

Peering tentatively inside, the green silk seemed to be endless. From the far edge, a glint of brass – where the ladder rungs began. Ironically enough, Hermione knew she hadn't the time to get lost in a handbag now, but vowed to further explore her terrarium when she didn't feel the bellyache of procrastination. She merely cast a cushioning charm on the bottom of the bag, a _reducio_ on her belongings, and with a _wingardium leviosa_ had lowered her affects into the satchel.

'Easy enough,' she said, tucking her wand back into her robes.

* * *

It was 12.23 p.m. when Hermione arrived at the entrance to Dumbledore's office. She'd counted just six feathers on the unsightly stone gryphon before the staircases revolved, and down darted the Headmaster with Professor Snape closely behind – a flurry of dark robes, in barbed contrast with Dumbledore's embroidered purple, a shadow following the light.

'Ah,' said Dumbledore, resting a hand on Snape's shoulder, smiling at her. 'We're early!' Hermione looked between the two men, and realisation dawned upon her with the speed of a sneeze. Snape, of course, was well aware of the circumstances and looked to have resigned himself to his fate – though, she noticed, his eyes were belying his impartiality. 'I daresay, Severus, we've still kept young Hermione waiting.'

'It would seem so . . .'

'Am I'—she met Snape's eye, clearing her throat—'staying with you, Sir?'

He rolled his eyes and inclined his head.

'Now, now, Severus,' Dumbledore chided. 'You're to be more loquacious than that, else you might drive Hermione up the wall . . . Just this afternoon she, as young as she is, hypothesised another use for dragon's blood that has been right in front of our eyes all along! Minerva may very well be correct; she is truly the brightest mind of her generation.'

Hermione blushed. 'Oh, I don't know Professor.'

Snape's eyes narrowed. 'Is that so,' he said, turning to Dumbledore. 'Miss Granger happening upon something that even _the _Albus Dumbledore did not foresee?'

She felt her hackles raise. '_Happen upon_?' she thought. 'Professor,' she said, evenly as she could, 'it was a little more considered than that.'

'Is that so?'

'Yes.' Afterall, she had set a few millimetres of the gifted Norwegian Ridgeback blood alight. That day, when her father Robert posed the theory, the two—trusting empirical evidence above all—had undergone a spot of familial bonding. They had gone out into the garden, poured a shallow pipette of blood onto the centre of a stray paving stone, moved to the middle of their lawn. Hermione wished she could perform a quick _incendio_, set the blood alight from a safe distance – though, there was the small matter of the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery, and she vowed to track her age better so she'd know when it was no longer an issue; perhaps a spell, or some potion could aid her . . . Hermione's father, with his muggle resourcefulness, had built a rather ingenious contraption with wooden chopsticks; they had taped together a four-meter pole, set the tip alight, and touched it to the small splash of viscous blood on the paving stone. And, as they theorised, the blood burned – burned without end, in fact, in a narrow foot-high column of green flame. They had to quell the fire by setting (and ruining) her mother's vase atop, and starving the fire of oxygen. 'You see, I ran a test,' she clarified, 'before posing it to Professor Dumbledore.'

'And what may I ask is this luckless thirteenth use of dragon's blood?' he asked, crossing his arms.

'Fuel,' she said. 'And potentially a petrochemical substitute.'

He blinked. 'Petrol?'

'Yes,' she said. 'Dragons breathe fire. Petrol burns aflame. It was logical. Fire.'

'Three points from Gryffindor,' he snapped. 'For your brazen cheek, Miss Granger.'

Dumbledore chuckled. 'School's out as the children say, Severus, the hourglasses immobile.'

Hermione smiled sheepishly at the indignant teacher. 'Apologies, Professor.'

'For your cheek, Miss Granger, or for my displeasure in not being able to take away points?'

'Both,' she said, sharing an amused smile with Dumbledore, 'naturally.'

And then, all at once, the blaze of revulsion in Snape's dark eyes dimmed a fraction. 'Victory?' she thought. 'So soon?' It certainly felt like it, though she schooled her expression. She doubted the potions master would treat her too kindly if she extended any more of her overfamiliarity towards him—her Gryffindorness, she figured, would have to be set on the back burner for the summer.

'Now,' said Dumbledore, gesturing them all to walk on, the three falling into step together, 'I shall escort you both to the Apparition point. From there, Miss Granger, you shall disapparate with Severus to his home, where you'll remain for the summer. He has been briefed on your . . . _assignment_.'

'Hardly,' Snape muttered.

Dumbledore tutted. 'Such a sceptic you are, Severus.'

Hermione kept her growing mirth at the two's easy rapport to herself. Professor Dumbledore had probably known Snape for most of the latter's life. As they cleared the threshold of the School building itself, and they began making their way towards Hagrid's hut and the Forbidden Forest beyond it, an image of herself twenty years in the future past before here waking eyes. It was her, of course, but a little grey at the temples, with the Headmaster much like he was now, though walking with the aid of an elaborate walking stick. Wizarding folk had been known to live for nigh on 150 years, and the chances of surpassing that grew with an individual witch's or wizard's magical potency; Fred and George Weasley had hundreds of Galleons tied in various bets on Dumbledore hitting 200, at the very least.

Dumbledore's and Snape's conversation did throw something up for Hermione, however, and, in a moment of impulsiveness, her right hand darted out to grab the velvet-trimmed sleeve of the Headmaster's robes and she gave it a little tug – Dumbledore looked down at the girl with a smile, and slowed in his steps, the two letting Snape walk a little ahead of them, down the steep grassy hills towards Hagrid's hut.

'Sorry for that, Professor,' she quietly said. 'I was just wondering . . . how much can I share with Professor Snape? And how much does he already know?'

'I trust Severus Snape with my life,' he said. 'As should you—'

'—Of course.'

'Yes. Though, he does not know . . . the specifics of how you've been getting help this year. Nor should he.'

'You'd like me to l—'

'Not lie, Hermione. _Never lie_. Just . . . be selective with the truth.'

'For the greater good, Professor?' she asked.

He looked down at her sharply, and the two stopped in their careful paces, now twenty meters or so further up the uneven steps than Snape. The wind howled, and their robes whipped around their legs. 'He knows you _have_ the Time-Turner _now_, Hermione, but not that you've _had_ it. I have neither confirmed nor denied his suspicions—he has suspicions, yes—but I know he will not react kindly and will expect some further foul-play,' he said. 'It may become necessary when you absolutely must divulge the whole truth, and you will let circumstance judge whether that be appropriate.'

'And if not,' she said, 'I take it I can just go back in time and stop myself?'

'Well, indeed,' said the Headmaster. 'You have opportunities to _course-correct_, as the muggles say. They become limited in such close quarters, but opportunities, nonetheless. '

'Professor Dumbledore,' Hermione said, 'what exactly does Professor Snape think I'm doing with him over the summer?'

He chuckled, and the two resumed their walking. 'Severus has become my closest confidant, and I suppose, in many respects, I am his and a fair deal more. He knows, Miss Granger, of the entirety of your mission and even if he was being uncharacteristically dim, I doubt it would take much for him to figure out. And he should be kept up to date with all your advancements, Hermione, you are to report to him for _anything _you should need or discover. However, you're not to fall into the habit of taking directions from him; Professor Snape has his own tasks to be doing this summer, and you will remain on his better side if you take initiative. He is of the . . . _prickly_ sort, much like our dearest Buckbeak,' he chuckled, nodding to the hut as they passed it, 'proud to the bitter end. I expect you'll be doing a lot of bowing in the early days, Miss Granger!'

'I do not doubt it,' she said.

**=/=**

Ahead of them, Severus Snape was stationary, the sound of the Headmaster and Hermione Granger's laughter carrying down towards him, down where he stood in the shadow of the Forbidden Forest. He thought the two certainly cast a sickeningly endearing figure: Dumbledore's arm thrown around the girl's shoulders, their heads bent together, laughing more raucous than anyone had nerve to on a day like today. Above the thunder cackled, and below these two were giving it a run for its money.

He thought, considering their relative _cosiness_, 'She'll be initiated into the Order soon enough.'

Severus quirked a brow at the old man when he came a little closer, folded his arms close to his chest at the clatter of thunder, the fork of silver cutting the horizon. 'We were just saying,' said Dumbledore, 'how you're rather comparable to a hippogriff, Severus.'

His eyes cut to the girl, and her cheeks grew pink under his study. 'Oh!' the girl gasped, turning to the Headmaster. 'I don't think that's fair, Professor. I-I . . . I . . . It wasn't me who suggested it.'

'Indeed . . . ?' he asked, watching how her bony hands tugged at the strap of her bag as if she was trying to root herself into the earth. She rocked on her heels. 'Though,' he said, 'this does ring entirely of your sense of humour.' Severus looked to Dumbledore now, and the old man was grinning widely, though somewhat like a child caught shovelling his peas into a napkin. 'Are we to spend the afternoon engaging in more appallingly inaccurate metaphors, or haven't we homes to return to?'

'Quite right,' said Dumbledore nodding, and then turning to the girl. He rested his frail-looking hands on her shoulders and leaned down so they were eye-to-eye. The entire thing looking far too homely and comfortable, in his opinion, for a Headmaster and his second-favourite Gryffindor – he supposed that the miscreant Potter received kisses upon the forehead. 'Good luck,' he said to Granger, and then more whispers lost to the clap of thunder above.

She nodded furiously, however, and then looked to Severus. 'I will. I will. Of course. Thank you, Professor Dumbledore.'

Severus cleared his throat, and with a sharp tilt of his head, gestured for the girl to come nearer. 'Miss Granger,' he said, as she grew closer, 'is this to be your first disapparition?'

Dumbledore, behind the girl, nodded to him. He saw the Professor's knotty wand drop down his wide right sleeve and into his hand, and almost as soon as the Headmaster had gotten a firm grip on the handle, he was gone; Miss Granger appeared to mistake the pop of his disapparition as just another trick of the weather, and he felt his lips grow thin in disapproval.

'Yes,' she said. 'This is my first time . . . I hear it's awful.'

He rolled his eyes. 'One gets used to it,' he said, and then wondered for a moment when he had gotten into the business of meaningless prosaicisms – least of all offering them to Gryffindor swots. 'Side-Along—the method you'll be employing today—never gets any better.' 'Damnit! Again,' he thought, 'why am I bothering?'

Ever since finding out the Headmaster's grand plan—divulged when Sirius Black had made a miraculous escape from the Hogwarts' grounds—Severus had been thinking on how he would endure the girl over the summer. The fact that the old man had entrusted such a vital task to her was initially beyond even his comprehension – why her, a mere adolescent, than a seasoned member of the Order? And then, as the Headmaster revealed that she was in the possession of a Ministry-authorised Time-Turner, the matter was elucidated—and far more than just that. Severus was no fool; he expected that the Ministry had granted her permission to use the device at the very beginning of her third year, and after a brief search in the School administration records, he'd discovered that she received an Outstanding in every subject bar Divination, subjects that were, curiously enough, timetabled one on top of the other. The Headmaster's Gryffindor bias apparently knew no bounds. Sirius' miraculous escape, also, less divine intervention, and more a little toying with time. When confronted with this accusation—that Hermione had been in possession of the Time-Turner for much longer than he was told, and had used it to free Black—the Headmaster offered neither a confirmation nor denial. Though, again, Severus was intelligent enough to know that this was more than mere Gryffindor favouritism or heroic theatrics, however much it pained him to admit. The muggleborn Hermione Granger was essential to Harry Potter's defeat of Voldemort – more than the boy himself, he'd wager, not least given her recent elevated status. If she'd used the blasted thing to fiddle with her grades a little, more power to her.

Severus, however, was absolutely salivating at the thought of the chit's guilt—oh, how she would be eaten alive by it! 'How long,' he thought, 'will she wait, before exposing herself?' He would give her perhaps until the end of the day before she announced quite how long she'd been in possession of the Time-Turner, and then—_dear Merlin. _Perhaps the entertainment factor would be worth all infringements on his privacy; he almost scoffed aloud at the thought.

Severus Snape's privacy had long been infringed upon – in fact, was there ever a time in his life where he kept his own confidence? In childhood it was his father, who in bouts of alcohol-induced paranoia, would beat the secrets out of the boy; then Lily Evans, who with her innocent wiles, would coax the truth from his lips; after losing her, the various Death Eaters preying upon those of lesser rank – the half-blood Severus, oh so desperate to prove himself; the Dark Lord's legilimency, an inescapable trap—nothing sacred, nothing hidden; and since his fall, there was Dumbledore, with his boundless love and empathy, a different sort of suffering altogether.

Looking down at the girl—beside him, she watched with glee unchecked as the lightning splintered the sky—and he almost pitied her naivety. 'Was she aware' he thought, 'of just how much she'll lose when entering the fold?' He shook himself out of those spiralling thoughts almost immediately; there were more pressing matters at hand.

Disapparating. Now, he knew the Headmaster preferred a mere touching of the wrists, but he wasn't confident enough in Granger's self-preservation skills; she would, no doubt, impulsively let go mid-apparition, and he'd be picking up pieces of her from here to Spinner's End, his family home situated on the outskirts of Manchester. And lifting her into his arms like some child was definitely not an option – so Severus had settled on an alternative, one that he'd been ruminating over for the better part of this morning.

'Come here,' he said. From his cloak, he pulled out a sweet-smelling stomach-settling potion, which she took and downed without hesitation. He frowned once again in disapproval.

'It's okay, Professor,' she said, amused at his irritation. 'I'm certain you're not trying to poison me . . . and I know a non-vomitus potion by sight.' And then she looked pensive, but he was rather more concerned with the sudden warmth in his cheeks: she was uncommonly quick for a Hogwarts' student, and now imbued with the good regard of the Headmaster. Treating her like an ordinary student was going to be difficult, but he would try nonetheless; preferential treatment was only reserved for the children of Death Eaters, and some of his more studious Slytherins, anybody else was hardly worth the effort.

'Okay, Miss Granger,' he said. 'As this is your first time, I would like to take every precaution. So, in a moment I will be casting a freezing charm, and—'

'_Excuse me_?'

'—it shall ensure you turn up in one piece, Miss Granger!'

'But sir,' she insisted, 'that's . . . so _extreme_.'

'Girl,' he hissed, 'why are you making this so difficult?' 'Of course,' he thought, shaking his head at her. 'Of course, she'd make this more difficult than it must be.'

'There has to be an alternative!'

'The alternative is something aside from the _petrificus totalus_ I intened, perhaps an _immobulus_ – is that more to your liking?'

She huffed and crossed her arms. 'I refuse to be worked upon by your wand, Professor. It is unnecessarily cruel.'

He barked out a short laugh. 'Worked upon by my wand?' he thought. 'I must write that down if only to remind her of such stupidity in the years to come. Cruel indeed.' 'And what is your alternative,' he asked. 'You, Miss Granger, who know nothing at all of—'

'Well, that is simply untrue, Professor!' she cried, surprising him with her furious air. 'I have _obviously_ researched apparition!' _Obviously_. 'All I need is to take your arm firmly and not let go.'

'Then take it!' he hissed, at his wit's end. At that she hooked her right arm through the crook of his left, her hand curling up and taking a firm hold his bicep; her body angled much too close to him than he would have preferred. 'Mark my words,' he said to her, 'should you let go between here and Manchester, I will categorically refuse to find and fetch and bind all the paltry pieces of your Gryffindor hind.'

Her eyes, the colour of tree sap, were wide. 'Yes, Professor Snape,' she said, her jaw tight, and her cheeks ruddy. 'I won't let go.'

He sighed, and began clearing his mind of everything bar Spinner's End—he could not think any longer on the girl, nor her too-loud breathing, nor the fact that she would be his ward for the summer, not even that the Dark Lord's return was imminent. He retrieved his wand—13 ¾ inches, a dark yew with a phoenix feather core, utterly rigid—from the sleeve Miss Granger had taken a hold of. With Spinner's End resolutely in his mind, Severus Snape disapparated.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Merry December to you, dear readers. In the political hellscape that is the UK, it is election night, and in an effort to keep myself away from the news, I have thrown on Nick Drake and edited this here chapter for you. I feel like there's been a tiny bit of a wait between this and the last chapter – I am a poetry editor at a literary journal here in England and we're in the midst of submission season, so I haven't had as much time as I would like to dedicate to this, but I am trying!

Thank you for all the reviews, the follows, the favourites, the alerts – these small encouragements makes this all the more sweeter. Continue on, I say!


	4. CHAPTER FOUR - HOME & HEARTH

**CHAPTER FOUR**  
**HOME & HEARTH**

* * *

When Severus and Hermione landed in dark narrow alley behind a row of three-storey terraced houses in Spinner's End, Hermione's grip loosened and she sank to her knees, dry-heaving over the uneven concrete slabs, orange with lichen. And Severus found himself frowning once more; the anti-vomitus potion either hadn't enough time to work on her system (highly unlikely, as he'd brewed potion himself the evening before, and had ensured its amplified potency and immediate effect), or she'd been fostering a weakened constitution, devoid of some of the nutrients the potion was supposed to work with, despite—and perhaps because of—all her dalliances with time; he'd wager a year's pay on the latter. The rain was perpetually falling in Manchester, whatever the season, so when she rose her palms were imbedded with pebbles, caked in watery mud. Severus watched her wiping her mouth of bile with a grimace, right herself, and then freeze at her surroundings.

'Welcome,' he said, looking up and down the deserted alley dotted with recycling bins and stray packets of crisps, 'to Spinner's End.'

'Which one is yours?' she asked, looking to each identical rear gate, wondering which one they were to enter.

'Ah . . .' He reached into the inside pocket of his robes and pulled out a scrap of crumpled parchment. It read:

_Master of Potions Professor Severus Tobias Snape lives at  
72 Spinner's End, Oldham, Greater Manchester, England._

'Your home is under a Fidelius?' she asked, mouth agape. And she stared at the words, moving her chapped lips as she read, and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, wordlessly handing the parchment back to Snape. The message curled into ash as it met the tip of his wand.

Hermione raised her head, and no sooner as she'd done so, between two slats of wood another spoke emerged, and another, then the entire ten-foot high gate, where in his youth he'd scratched in his door number with a beer bottle cap—behind that, the Snape home enfolded out from between number 70 and 74.

Since the early nineteenth century, the Snapes had earned their paltry living by working in the cotton mills, the town being the epicentre of textile production for most of the nineteenth and twentieth century. And Spinner's End was perpetually in the shadow of three 300-foot spires: defunct red-brick chimneys he'd spent a childhood investigating. On either side of the garden were eight-foot-high wooden fences he'd spent an afternoon last summer painting a forest green, and the back, behind the alley, an exterior wall of a disused cotton mill. All of this, for Severus, was home, but he suspected that it would be rather claustrophobic for the girl after spending the school year gallivanting around the school grounds, sneaking into every forbidden nook and cranny.

He slid the bolt on the fence and gestured for her to step through, onto the lawn. 'The Fidelius is a recent development,' he said. 'When considering where to place Harry Potter's closest confidant'—she shifted on her feet, sighed, and he found her belligerence did not infuriate him as it had done earlier—'the headmaster and I trawled through every conceivable scenario, every damnable location, where you'd be protected. Eventually, we applied Occam's razor and arrived at this conclusion. This was the simplest option, less taken for granted, fewer assumptions, minimal risk.'

By the expression on her peaky face, and her general know-it-all tendencies, Severus understood she'd half a dozen questions, and pre-empting them all would be an exercise in madness, so he suffered the moment it took her to verbalise her thoughts. Eventually, she spewed a slurry, and he was relieved that he did not have to explain the further workings of the Fidelius charm – he'd be here a fortnight. 'Who are the other secret keepers?' she asked.

'There are none,' he said.

'Not Dumbledore?'

'Not Dumbledore.'

'The school and Ministry records?'

'Revised.'

'To?'

'Hogwarts.'

'Gringotts?'

'Informed.'

'Your neighbours?'

'Ignorant.'

And then, a brief hesitation, a look of understanding, and she said with more certainty than he expected, 'The Fidelius will cloak all my _foolish wand-waving_.'

He pressed his fingertips to his lips, fought the upturning of his lips. 'Indeed, Miss Granger. Though, that particular benefit is not widely known . . . How is it that you've inferred it? Knowledge of the charm exists only between a select group of witches and wizards.'

'I did not infer it. I researched it,' she said, haughty, and the deduction of points was almost on his lips. 'After discovering the events that led to the Potters' deaths'—Severus winced, unable to control the impulse, though the Granger girl looked too caught up in her self-vindication to notice how he'd almost been winded by the mention of _her_ death—'I looked through positively every book in the Hogwarts library to find it, and realised that I had come across the charm before.'

'Oh?' he said, curious. To his knowledge only two copies existed of the rare and singular text on the Fidelius: the one Restricted Section, and the one that he'd borrowed from Dumbledore, gathering dust in his personal library here at Spinner's End, unread.

Her eyes widened comically. 'Yes. In a book by Belladonna Dumbledore.' Her voice grew to almost a whisper, looking even paler than before, her hands working up and down the strap of her bag. 'An entire section on the construction and uses of the Fidelius—perhaps, it's why Professor Dumbledore is so partial to it, given she's an ancestor. Though, the charm was constructed by Belladonna as a means of necromancy, of course. The chapter concluded by detailing a barbaric ritual: galvanising the dead to reveal their secret-kept location. Not long enough to sustain them, of course, but necromancy, nonetheless.'

'_The Nightshade Guide_, no?' he asked. 'I have it . . . though it remains mostly unread. And she, Belladonna, speaks on the use of underage magic?'

She looked thoughtful, head tilted to one side. 'Fleetingly. She describes the Fidelius as . . . Death's veil, though I think purgatory is more fitting.'

'Metaphor,' he scoffed.

'Yes, Professor. Nothing—not magic, not fragrance, nor vision—violates its bounds, the magic contained within the secret-kept location is, well, absolutely secret . . . Though enough magic inhibited to a particular location, the magic looks for an out, pumps into the earth, forms and feeds ley lines.' Together, the two gazed at the lush lawn, dotted with flowers of clover; their eyes darting to a single magpie flying over the gardens, coming to perch on the fence that separated the Snape garden from the one next door. It stared across, and it daren't move to traverse the lawn. 'Or so Belladonna theorises,' she added, watching the magpie shuffle on the fence. 'My understanding of ley theory is rather elementary, Professor.'

Snape's gaze had shifted from the magpie, back to the girl. She looked as tense as she always did, watching him, perhaps waiting for his reprimand, or some ridiculing. 'You will have opportunities to fix that,' he said, instead. 'I would consider this _visit_ as an educational residency, and the headmaster and I your patrons.'

'I really do appreciate that, sir . . .' She pressed a palm to her mouth, cleared her throat, and then turned around in a tight circle to see all the sights. 'It must be rather difficult returning here,' she said, wistful, perhaps for home.

He scoffed, a little more performative than he'd planned. 'Hardly, Granger. It's my home.'

'Yes,' she said. 'But that's not exactly what I mean.'

'And what _exactly _do you mean?'

She smiled, and tugged a wayward strand of hair back into her low bun, and gestured to the abundance of warm-toned brick. 'Gryffindor colours,' she said, with a shrug.

**=/=**

Hermione's mother, Jean, always said, 'You can judge an entire family on the state of their back lawn.' Professor Snape's lawn was ankle-high, dotted with fibrous flowers, and so much clover. The two stood at the back of the yard, under the dappled shade of a tall silver birch—the tree had learned to grow high and wide, the tallest branches flush against the auburn bricks of the mill, a hunchbacked thing, reaching out towards the home. There was wrought iron patio furniture further up—a narrow table and four heavy chairs—the wooden slats looking riddled with rot from even her place here, twenty feet away, the iron slicked with green paint but it had long since peeled; the set was in front of the large patio doors, which stretched across back of the house, the glass covered by dark drapes and reflecting the green of the garden. Hermione wondered what her mother would make of the Snapes, with their brilliant white PVC windows, boxed in on all sides.

'Am I,' he said, crossing his arms, 'to expect a constant cycle of lecturers and small-talk?'

'Inevitably,' she said. 'We'd go barmy otherwise!'

'Speak for yourself, Granger.' And he walked up the garden, head down, taking long strides and mumbling to himself, walking with such familiarity over the lawn that he'd deftly dodge clods of raised ground. Hermione jogged to keep up, and then slowed down after a second wave of nausea hit her so hard, her knees buckled. Down she went again, vaguely aware of the Professor exclaiming, 'What now?!' when he heard the guttural sound of her gagging. Hermione felt like something had her stomach in a vice grip, and was slowly ringing out the acid. She pressed a fist to her mouth, eyes screwed shut, though was vaguely aware from the sudden heat coming from her left side that Snape crouched beside her. 'What have you done to yourself?' he demanded.

'Nothing!' she hissed between her teeth.

'I am warning you, Granger . . . I am not going to tolerate untruths.'

She looked at him through the tears in her eyes and shook her head. 'It's fine . . . it's private, Professor.'

The man looked suddenly murderous, nostrils flared and breathing sharply, brows drawn into dark furrows. 'Are you . . . Miss Granger, please tell me you're not so idiotic as to get yourself _pregnant_?'

And despite nausea, she couldn't help the hysteria that followed. _Pregnant_? 'Dear God,' she thought. 'He thinks I'm pregnant?' Laughing, her hands balled into fists and pressed into her stomach, she felt almost of a ghost of a touch on her back, a 'Miss Granger?' full of trepidation, or, if she was actually as delirious as she felt, concern. And increasingly, she the laughter crept closer and closer to sobs; within a moment, there she was, bawling her eyes out in front of the fearsome and foolish Professor.

'You must get up,' he said, and _there_, he was definitely rubbing a hand up and down her back as if he were consoling some fickle first-year snake. 'We should get inside, out of the rain . . . or is it St Mungo's you need?'

She composed herself as much as she could, fishing a tissue from her robes, and swiping at her nose and cheeks. 'I told you, Professor, I'm fine. And I'm definitely not pregnant. I'm fine. Fine.'

'Evidently!' he seethed under his breath, rising to his feet smoothly, and wringing his hands.

'I'm sorry,' she said, at her feet. 'It won't happen again.' She brushed the mud and grass and clover from her knees and robes, and made her way up the garden, not waiting to follow the potions master, or check to see if he were following her. But she could feel his eyes on her the whole time, hear the whisper of his robes as he moved, the rustle of his boots against the mulch.

In silence, but somewhat absentmindedly, she watched Snape open up what looked like a ward matrix on the patio doors – it glowed a pearlescent white, layers of mandalas, dotted with hex runes and arithmancy equations. He pressed the tip of his wand to the centre, and said, 'Come on, Granger. Right in the centre.' And she fished her vine wand from her robe pocket, and followed suit—a thrum of hot magic engulfed her brain, as if her crown had been struck by lightning, and it took all her effort to keep a hold of her wand and keep it steady.

'You could have warned me, Sir.'

He huffed but made no comment, and instead chanted a spell in Latin. When he finished the matrix dissolved, and the door clicked open. He pushed up a bolt, and just as his hand closed on the handle, about to slide the whole panel to the left, he stopped and turned on her, looking down his nose at Hermione.

'Since,' he said, 'it's strictly forbidden by the Mistry to have underage wizards and witches sign magically binding contracts, and since it is the height of idiocy to engage in oaths and vows with feckless Gryffindors—not least those possessed with such contempt for school rules and spend untold hours with Dark books—I will have to take you at your worthless word, Miss Granger.' And then, he stared at her for a long moment, his dark eyes flickering between both of hers, sparking with contempt.

'Perhaps a blood pact?' she said, a smile tugging at her lips. 'If my word means so little.'

There was a lightness in his expression. Nonetheless, 'Do not tempt me,' he reproached. 'I will have your word, that whatever happens in this house, _whatever _you discover, it goes no further than myself and the headmaster – and the latter only if you must'—she nodded quickly—'I . . . I am not used to living with anybody, least of all a schoolgirl . . .' He grimaced and turned back towards the door. 'Am I making myself clear, Miss Granger?'

She nodded, and then realised the futility. 'Yes, Sir. The headmaster told as much to me too.'

'Fine.' He tugged open the door, wide enough to walk through comfortably, and disappeared behind the heavy blackout curtains. 'Mind how you step.'

* * *

In bouts of homesickness, Ron had described every inch of his own house, from the creaky front door to the garage where his father, Arthur, collected muggle knickknacks and artifacts. It always served as a fascinating and educational lecture for both herself, the muggleborn, and Harry, muggleborn in all but blood. His stories would often feature that clock in their kitchen, where Fred and George would often flicker between "mortal peril" and some utterly mundane destination like "dentist". It apparently was a house where the dishes washed themselves with a flick of the wand, rooms existed without bounds, and clever spellwork ensured that only specific siblings could enter rooms at any given time.

So, Hermione had been expecting a level of wizardry in the innards of the Snape home but was initially surprised to find it entirely barren of the hijinks and ease-of-living she had thought. Everything so still, so stagnant.

The room she'd entered was a modest lounge, each corner dotted with beaten armchairs and rickety end-tables, tucked into nooks lined with shelves, and upon the shelves books, and the books were all hardback and clothbound, not a speck of dust to be seen (evidence of _some _wandwork, she expected), the floor the original wooden slats. Out through the lounge, a small hallway. In front, a narrow door through which there were stairs going down to the potions laboratory in the cellar—she was reluctantly allowed to enter if she absolutely must. To her right, a long and functional kitchen with Formica countertops, linoleum floors, and an olive-green fridge-freezer—Snape would be taking care of dinner, but she'd have to make her way otherwise, the only logical way considering they were at the whim of their own internal clocks. To her left the front room with a navy carpet so thick her feet sank into it, a set of forest green chesterfield sofas, and in the corner a cabinet cluttered with empty crystal decanters, photo frames that held unmoving pictures of the dark-haired Snapes—from her place in the doorway, she could not make out their faces at all, and given how quickly the professor had shut the door she expected she would never learn. 'Just for taking company,' he'd said.

And then he'd lead her upstairs to the cramped first-floor landing, where they stood for a moment facing three doors with peeling paint spaced well-apart, a second set of stairs curving behind them.

'Your bedroom, the communal bathroom, and my room,' said Snape, gesturing to each the dark wood doors, in turn. 'No rooms are warded against you now, but I'd rather you stay out of my bedroom . . . _obviously_.'

'Yes, of course,' she'd said. 'I think . . . I think I would appreciate some privacy too.'

He had nodded once, and then turned towards the stairs. 'The library you were promised is upstairs,' said Snape, and then tilted his head in that direction, and up they went another steep flight of stairs, at the top of which was a heavily bolted door. As he did before entering the house, to her bemusement, Snape opened up a ward matrix and engaged in what she recognised as some intricate and _utterly beautiful _wand verification test. A slim wisp of burgundy magic dialling the runes like an old muggle rotary telephone. 'If you would . . .' he said. 'Trace every third rune anti-clockwise, thrice, and then hold your wand at the centre until the matrix dissolves entirely. No incantations necessary.'

This time around, the magic was less the painful spark of electricity, but more like she'd been sipping her father's beef bone broth which he brewed when she was particularly poorly; it brought the balminess of cayenne to her throat, singed her tongue, warmed her blood. The magic, as she completed the first rune, settled below her navel, and she shot a look to the potion's master who had eyes trained upon her wand. Given all those hours of Adjustment, her Charms reading was advanced enough, and she understood that wherever the magic settled was vitally important to the construction and the fundamental nature of the wards. Earlier, when she'd been permitted entry, the electricity had whizzed only around her brain—her identity, her thoughts, her consciousness—and she'd read that such wards signified that the home had been keyed into an awareness of her magical signature. Now, with this warmth taking a foothold in her womb, the warding was rather more concerned with her bodily signature, her baser intentions, her morality. And with the intensity of this feeling, the convolution of the spellwork, she didn't have to look up in a textbook to know where on the spectrum of permissible magics the ward was placed. 'Is this the first of his secrets I'm expected to keep?' she thought.

As she lowered her wrist to her side, she looked to him, brows raised. 'Dark?' she asked, her abdominal muscles tight, her face warm.

He gave her a levelling stare. 'Frankly, the most potent wards are,' he said, and then, after a moment of hesitation: 'It bodes well, Miss Granger, that you're so attuned to your magic . . . No one but you and I'—her mouth went dry, ears rang—'are permitted in this room, and this warding will release a cascade of curses for anyone who forces entry. For that reason, should anything untoward happen during your stay, and you need to seek refuge, this is where you come, this is where I should expect to find you.'

She grinned, thoughts turning dark. 'And you'll survive if only to allow me to leave the room?'

His eyes narrowed. 'Please refrain from flirting with me, Miss Granger. I am not—'

'Professor! That is not—'

'—one of your—'

'—what I meant at all!'

'Gryffindor _mates_.'

Unblinking, they stared at one another. Snape breathed heavy; Hermione not at all. '_Flirting with him_?' she thought, incensed. '_Flirting_? _With Professor Snape_?' But Hermione attempted to sift through her memories, tried to identify one instance where she'd employed some churlish wiles in conversation with any male, let alone the standoffish and terrifying Professor. 'How does one even flirt?' she thought. 'How bizarre! As if I'm some Lavender-esque tart!' She said, 'I think the summer will be a learning experience.'

'Oh really?' he scoffed. 'Pray, tell me, Granger, what do _you presume_ to teach _me_?'

'Something of my character, I hope,' she said.

'And this _charge of_ flirting with me is a slight against that character, I take it?'

She nodded, resolute. 'I do not flirt,' she said, and then wondered whether all their defining conversations would take place in these liminal spaces. 'I have no reason to,' she added, 'not in these circumstances, least of all with you . . . _Professor_.'

'Quite. Yes.'

At that word, Snape ran the tip of his wand over the array of locks and swung open the door to his library.

Considering the rather banal tastes displayed in the downstairs rooms—though she hadn't a clue to what degree of opulence Professor Snape had decorated the bedrooms—she had been expecting much of the same here: functional, beige, a little hackneyed.

The room took the entire slim rectangular footprint of the Snape house, with double-height ceilings, and a maze of slim wooden gangways ringing the upper level; it was evidence of rather resilient magic wound into the structure because from the outside the property was only three-stories high, topped with a dark slate roof. Professor Snape, perhaps in some nostalgia or sentimentality, had enchanted the ceiling of the library much like the Great Hall: as they walked in, it showed the thundery skies of Scotland, light filtering through the clouds, lightning crackling. The floor was covered with an array of Persian rugs, in deep greens and blues, even something backed in a Gryffindor red ran along the far wall on her left side. Ebony ladders and bookshelves lined every square inch of wall, though they were protected from the dust with glass—well, except the wall on the easterly side; there sat a great wood-burning hearth, the brick chimney extending to the full height of the ceiling, dotted with Academic paintings, pencil studies of magical creatures, and a single tapestry. Plush high-back armchairs and sofas sat in front of the hearth, upholstered with olive-green and mustard velvet. In the centre of the room, a tessellation of desks polished with a dark stain, cluttered with books and paperweights, a veritable fortune in loose parchment, feathers, and ink wells. 'I,' she thought, 'would dabble in the dark arts too, if only to protect this.'

But Hermione gravitated over to the fireplace, away from the books. As she walked over, she felt the professor fall in-step beside her. She stopped behind the sofa, looking up at the aged tapestry that hung immediately above the wide, ornate marble mantel. Blindly, she opened her satchel and held a hand over the dark space. '_Accio Paradise Lost_' she said.

The medium-sized Penguin paperback flew into her hand, and she looked down at the cover; it depicted the naked Eve, centered, plucking what looked to be a green apple or a pear or a lemon, coiled on the opposite side of the tree was Satan the serpent, jaw unlatched, his eyes level with her barely-there breasts; a bird which looked rather like a phoenix watched in the foreground. The tapestry that hung in the Snape library, of Flemish origin, was undoubtedly the original. It showed the wider scene: the foreground of the right side, illustrating the naked Adam, lunging for the forbidden fruit—a second Eve holding one out for him to take with her right hand, her left coiled another close to her breast. A lion slumbered at Adam's feet.

Hermione handed the book to Snape. 'Look at the copyright page,' she said. And he did for a long moment, and then shot his eyes back at her, the pupils wide, the open book trembling in his hands. She tugged her Time-Turner out from her under her shirt and cradled it in her hands. 'There is more to time than _this_,' said Hermione.

She took the book from his hands, and clutched it to her chest: the Penguin Classics version of Milton's _Paradise Lost was_ first published in the year 2000, six years in the future.

* * *

**Author's Note: **Can you tell that I'm having a lot fun with this story? It's quite the escape from politics, and poetry editing, and all the gastronomy of this week. Merry Christmas, readers, and I hope you have a wonderful New Year. I shall be with you, again, soon enough.

Also! Lest I forget, a special thanks to those reviewers who have fallen into the habit of reviewing each chapter twice, and sending me such wonderful PMs – they make my mornings, and nights, and wintery afternoons.

Ciao!


	5. CHAPTER FIVE - BOOKS

_We must not look at goblin men,  
__We must not buy their fruits:  
__Who knows upon what soil they fed  
__Their hungry thirsty roots?_

— _Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market_

* * *

**CHAPTER FIVE**

**BOOKS**

* * *

For most of that afternoon, Snape and Hermione sat together on the sofa in front of the unlit hearth, heads craned up, eyes unblinking. 'What do you need?' he had asked her, after some silence. 'I don't know yet,' she'd replied. 'Draw up a list,' he advised. 'I'm not fond of lists,' she replied, 'they can be lost, they can be found.' And then, 'What do you think I should do?' she asked, and, 'Nothing,' he said. Back and forth in their anxious trivialities. 'Dinner?' 'Later.' 'Not now?' 'Later.' 'What do you fancy, Professor?' 'Silence, Miss Granger. I fancy silence.' 'Sure . . . Professor?' 'Yes, Miss Granger?' 'Would you call me Hermione?' 'I have considered it.' 'Professor Dumbledore does.' 'Yes, I noticed.' 'And?' 'And, what?' 'Will you?' 'Unlikely.'

So, she silenced herself, and continued her study of the tapestry, looking for clues in the warp and weft. _Paradise Lost_ sat closed and snug between their thighs, the spine touching Hermione, the yellowed pages against Snape's trouser leg—they had removed and hung up their outer robes upon entering the house, and Hermione had worked hard to maintain a balance between that Gryffindor overfamiliarity and their lukewarm (and distinctly familial) intimacy. Asking him to call her by her given name was merely a rung on the ladder, sitting beside him on the sofa, another rung.

Overhead, the setting sun warmed the charmed sky, and it was then Hermione realised that they'd sat in their jilted silence staring at the tapestry for some six hours. And all that time, the movement of it against her skin and mind had felt like she'd been standing in a light drizzle of rain – this sensitivity to time had settled into her consciousness after using the Time-Turner for just a couple of weeks.

Back in September, after spending three nights of Adjustment hidden in the Restricted Section, Hermione had found the right spell to translate one of the oldest surviving texts on time magic: _We Moirae and Our Loom_. It was written in a rare and rudimentary strain of ancient Greek, and though, of course, translations of the text existed, and were readily available in the Restricted Section sat on the shelf beneath the original text, she'd felt an innate suspicion of any witch or wizard who'd devoted time to writing and publishing a translation of work when such translation spells existed.

In some wizarding circles, ornate reproductions of the text were forbidden to touch the ground, held in homes and libraries on the topmost shelves—Hermione was relieved for that handy first-year levitation spell that brought down the leather-bound tome safely. Of all the books in the library, this had been the sole one slotted into a protective dragonhide sleeve _and_ wrapped in silvery velvet, with more than a dozen protective spells laced into the fabric. And since that day she had read the book, cover to cover, thrice.

It detailed the lives and philosophies of three muggleborn witches, the Moirae themselves: Atropos, Lachesis, and Clotho, identical triplets. Whether it was the sisters mythologizing their own beginnings, Hermione couldn't be sure, but apparently their magic had manifested _in utero_, slain their mother in the seventh month of gestation—their loom-worker mother had borne them at the age of twelve after she'd been raped in broad daylight by their elderly father, incensed by the sight of the young girl elbow-deep in purple dye. 'Our birth was sinful,' they'd began on that very first page, 'our lives recompense.' Staring at the tapestry—the phallic serpent, the youthful Eve—Hermione wondered whether the sisters were, in part, responsible for the kind of rhetoric the Abrahamic faiths clung.

But rather more importantly to Hermione's musings, _We Moirae and Our Loom_ was _the _seminal text on the philosophy of time. Each sister's magic represented a component of fate: Clotho, with her distaff and spindle, dual wands of grape-vine wood, she channelled her innate magic and spun the thread of life for every being; Lachesis, with her foot-long wand, measured the thread; and Atropos, with her shears—a two-pronged wand with both a unicorn-hair and thestral-heartstring core—chose the manner of death, and snipped the thread of life. And like any common thread, though there was a definite beginning and end to one's life, time could still loop on itself, form a knot, grow frayed at the edges.

Hermione recalled herself insisting to Dumbledore that any time traveller was bound to the closed-loop theory, and all her lived evidence supported it. The Moirae insisted the thread of one's fate conformed to the manipulations of time – this, to her scorn, was often misinterpreted, or mistranslated, or muddled entirely. The two were not interchangeable; the arithmanthic equations at the heart of the Ministry-issued Time-Turners supposed that they were synonymous, not accounting for the nuance or the complexity – rather strange, considering the meticulous nature of what they were attempting to accomplish. Dumbledore, eyes twinkling with mischief, had handed her his copy of _The Time-Turner Trials of the Twentieth Century_, a text penned by the Unspeakable faction who had created the Time-Turners in use today, detailing in fine detail the tribulations and conclusions and findings of the Time-Turner creation process – 'Being Supreme Mugwump Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore has its privileges,' he'd said.

This was the problem, and Hermione had been aware of it since her first reading of the Moirae text back in the autumn; and given that _Paradise Lost_ was published six years in the future, it was just fact that she'd have the real Time-Turner in her hands soon enough.

Eventually, Snape snapped her out of her thoughts. 'How did you procure the book?' he asked.

'I found it under my pillow in September,' she said, looking down to where the book lay, watching Snape drum his fingers on the cover. 'The headmaster and Professor McGonagall had just bequeathed me the Time-Turner'—it still lay on show, over her shirt, the sand glued to the bottom chamber—'and when I returned to the dormitory that evening . . . The first time I went back, it was to stake out the girls' dormitory to see if anyone had left it, but nothing. It appeared _as if by magic_ only when I set my head on the pillow.'

She looked up and saw him glaring. 'How long did you turn?' he asked.

'Well . . . five hours,' she said, a little hesitant.

He hissed. 'Foolish girl!'

'I know . . . The professors did warn me to take it easy but—'

'You could have died!' Hermione jumped in her seat at his sudden increase in volume. 'Did they not explain?' he asked. 'Half turns, Miss Granger. Half turns. Work up a resistance. The complete turns if you must. Men and women have lost their minds on quarter-turns! _Five complete turns_! Such barefaced idiocy!'

She smiled a little wanly. 'I quickly got used to it,' she said with a shrug.

'How used to it?' he probed, eyes turned slits, his fingers drumming over the cover louder, quicker. She was startled at how quickly it had come to this conversation; Professor Dumbledore had warned her that Snape would not act kindly should he discover the truth of her time-turning, but she knew that even the headmaster was blind to just how much she'd aged. But in the interest of maintaining some honesty with the man, and in an effort to climb another rung, she settled on disclosing the truth. He watched, a little crazed, as she deliberated the phrasing. 'Out with it!' he said.

She sighed, bringing the book out from under his grasp, and holding it to her chest; he drummed his thigh now. 'The schedules and workloads meant that by the end of the first week I'd taken to turning back at least ten hours every day.'

He winced. 'Fucking hell.' She gaped a little at his foul mouth. 'Was this another rung?' she thought. His eyes grew a little wide too, then softened into an unspoken apology. 'You turned,' he said, clearing his throat, 'ten hours every day?'

'At least,' she said, and then thought back to all those times she'd pushed herself, toyed with the time sickness, and found herself more than twenty-five hours in the past, for nothing but to turn in a perfected copy of Snape's homework, which he'd mark within the day. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'for nothing but to read under a disillusionment charm.'

He tutted, shook his head, crossed his arms, watched her. 'What of your age?' he asked. 'Have you calculated it?'

She nodded. 'About a year.'

He coughed, and choked out, 'A_ year_?'

'I shall be turning sixteen any day now.'

He regarded her carefully. 'You should be studied,' he said, his voice belying nothing. 'You should be dissected in the Department of Mysteries. This is a gross mi—'

'I know,' she said, interrupting him. 'I know.'

He heaved himself to his feet and pulled out his wand from his cuff. Silently, he touched the tip of the wand to her forehead, and then flicked up, murmuring an incantation under his breath—as she had done almost every day since September. A ghostly figure materialised to her left, made of pearlescent silver magic, her eyes wide and unblinking and all white. Hermione stood next to the professor, watching the diagnostic spectre. With his wand, he tapped the figure's head, and the cranium split in two, the skull and hair and skin winding to the back of her head like a Venetian blind.

He sucked in a breath through his teeth. '_Merlin_. You see, all of this . . . your brain, the entire damnable thing should be glowing a salubrious and _safe _white, but yours . . .' It wasn't white, far from it. The thing, her brain, was lit up by dim patches of yellow and lime, entire chunks of blue and lavender; thoughts buzzed between regions in a greyish spark—this, she knew, was yet more evidence that the Ministry Time-Turner's were poorly made; in magical engineering there were no unintended side-effects: with arithmancy, every variable known and considered. 'You're _bruised_,' he said. 'You have hurt yourself . . . and the damage may be irreversible.'

'_Finite incantatem_,' she said, jabbing her wand at this shadow. 'Professor,' said Hermione, 'I am well-aware. I have performed the diagnostics myself. I am keeping track of the magical malnourishment.'

'And yet,' he seethed, 'you continue.'

'Because I must . . . And I was ready to give it up,' she said, tears hot in her eyes. 'I was ready, and then Professor Dumbledore . . .'

'Yes,' he said, shoving his wand back up his sleeve, and staring into her glassy eyes. 'I will be having words with the old fool. This is the very height of irresponsibility, _you silly little girl_.'

She threw herself back onto the sofa and shot sparks pass the professor's leg, and into the fire. He did not jump aside like she'd expected (or hoped), like Harry and Ron often did when she lit the fireplace in the Gryffindor common room sometimes, too close to their bodies for comfort. Professor Snape just watched her, arms crossed, brows drawn and casting dark shadows over his deep-set eyes. His black hair hung limp, parted in the very centre of his forehead, framing his face in a haphazard layered cut, as if he'd taken shears to it himself; the thought made Hermione smile, which apparently was enough for the austere man to break out of his reflexion.

'Dinner,' he said. 'Downstairs. I'll call for you when it's done.' He turned and walked towards the door, making it clear enough that Hermione should stay here in the meantime.

'Professor! What are we having?' she asked, suddenly dreading the thought of being alone in this unfamiliar room. 'Shall I get changed? Do I have time?'

He stopped at the door, and turned to her, looking as unimpressed with her badgering as she'd supposed he would be. And then, in a gesture that was so unlike the man, he began to rub wearily at his eyes for some time; he pressed the palms of both hands to his face, and scrubbed, and worked at the muscles. 'You have more time than most would, Miss Granger,' he mumbled, speaking through the aperture between his hands. A laugh, unbidden, burst through Hermione's lips, and she was glad that the Professor was no longer sat beside her or she may have sprayed him with a little spittle. 'We are having whatever I can think of between now and when I get to the kitchen. Do with your attire what you wish; this is hardly a household where we don dress robes for dinner.'

She nodded. 'Would you like some help?'

He dropped his hands, shoulders rolling back, resuming is statuesque posture. 'No, Miss Granger. For this, at least, I do not need your help.'

* * *

With the faint clatter of pans coming from downstairs, Hermione decided that she'd been given an opportunity to briefly browse the contents of these shelves, and the thought of such a blissful pursuit filled her with unbridled joy.

To her eye, there didn't appear to be much logic that determined where particular subjects were housed in the room, bar a general usefulness to the professor. In the immediate vicinity of the great console of desks, spanning almost the entire ground floor, were thousands of books on potions, potion theory, and care of magical creatures and plants—texts ranging from the summoning powers of hellebore syrup to Dumbledore's own thirteen dragonhide-bound volumes on the uses of dragon's blood, the history of Felix Felicis and its clandestine connections to every major Potions breakthrough since its inception in the 18th century, to a hefty book that was interestingly titled _Robins Necrotic: a History of Saint Mungo's Offensive on Avian Humility_. Back editions of _Potions Quarterly _from as early as 1405, all here in their entirety, their spines so battered and broken Hermione daren't pluck them off their shelves.

On the back wall, in front of that Gryffindor-ish Persian rug, was a seemingly comprehensive section on Alchemy – a field entirely maintained by the scholarship of Nicolas Flamel; indeed, most of the books on these shelves were gifts to the Professor from Flamel himself, including what appeared to be a chest of correspondence—it was a burnished copper chest, with _NF Letters _engraved on the spine—slotted on the shelf between the books, and Hermione figured that she may try all her life to befriend the professor and he still may not allow her to read them. The collection of alchemy books itself was worth a fortune; not in the main Hogwarts' catalogue, or the Restricted Section, was there a single text on the volatile art of Alchemy; the tome in which Hermione had found mention of Nicolas Flamel in her first year was merely a collection on notable witches and wizards of the millennium and their equally notable findings.

And then, as she put her foot on the step ladder, to climb up to the upper level, she caught sight of her knees. They were still speckled with bits of mud and grass from earlier, and she decided that though this may not be a dress-robes-for-dinner household, her mother certainly insisted that she should at least wash her hands before dinner, and brushing of one's hair surely didn't go amiss.

As she exited the room, this thought of her parents, almost winded her. How long had it been since she'd seen them—how long had it_ really_ been? When she got to the bottom of the stairs, and onto the first-floor landing, sat on the stairs for a moment, her head in her hands.

'Just calm down, Hermione,' she thought. 'Mum and dad are fine. You are not a child. You are a young woman. You do not need your Mummy and Daddy.' And every moment of such mollification did nothing but make the tears fall faster. 'I am stuck here. I am stuck here trying to . . . trying to save the wizarding world on my own. Well,' she thought, 'I have Professor Snape . . . I think.' And that, she supposed, was some consolation. 'And he is nicer than I figured he would be. And he will be nicer still. I will be okay.'

Gripping the bannister, she hauled herself to her feet—the creaking of the floorboards made the rattle of metal downstairs stop for a few seconds, but it resumed as she walked on, and entered her room.

The room's proportions had not been tinkered with by magic. There was a small fireplace, two dark wood dressers set on either side of the chimney, slotted back against the walls—the bottom half panelled in a warm walnut wood, the upper painted in a navy. A four-post bed with cool, pale blue, silk bedding sat in front of the bay window. On the floor, another plush carpet, brown, with a pile so thick and unperturbed, she thought that perhaps the house had been newly decorated. In the centre of the ceiling hung an ornate crystal chandelier, and on the wall to her right, a muggle clock surrounded by half a dozen framed studies of potions ingredients and arithmanthic formulae. It was tastefully decorated, and uncluttered. Every drawer empty, even of dust—she quickly summoned her own clothes from her satchel and set them inside with a flourish of her wand, and the sheets perfumed with the clean floral scent of laundry detergent and fabric softener. She plucked out one of her many striped jumpers, linen trousers, her smalls, and possessed with an impromptu urge headed to the bathroom with her wand, a small tote of toiletries, and a towel.

The bathroom, she found, was rather narrow—if she stretched out her arms, her fingertips would almost touch the walls on either side. Every inch of the room bar the ceiling was panelled in white marble with silver veins, so stark that it hurt her eyes when she entered. The grouting between the tiles, the opaque curtain drawn around the porcelain bath-shower combo, devoid of mildew. A small frosted window was set into the wall at the back, in front of which sat the toilet and sink. No mirrors, she noticed. Not a single mirror in the bathroom, not even in her bedroom; not that she was particularly vain, but she found it rather disconcerting.

She turned the shower on and quickly got out of her school clothes. When she bathed, she lathered her coconut-scented shampoo in her hair, scrubbed at her knees and the soles of her feet with a pumice stone, stared down pensively at her crotch where downy hair had not only taken root, but grew aplenty. 'It's happening,' she thought. 'It's finally happening.' Hermione looked to her chest, wondering whether anything had developed between this morning and now, but no such luck. Speaking in rather medical terms last summer, Hermione's mother had given her a brief talk on the topic of puberty as they chopped vegetables for dinner – a discussion punctuated with nothing but shifty glances between mother and daughter, and her father's humming from the garden as he worked on pruning the hawthorn tree – and during that conversation Jean described herself as a "late bloomer", an "overnight woman", "gamine" until she had her first crush on a boy called Oliver. 'One day,' Jean said, 'I woke up, and needed a d-cup. The next day I'd soiled my bedsheets.' Hermione had never really invested in her mother's hyperbole—'a woman's body,' she thought, 'is not a series of falling dominoes.'—but even she had to admit, these changes were picking up pace. She dreaded the thought of soiling her sheets with blood at Professor Snape's house but understood that it very well may be a possibility. 'At least,' she thought, 'I can warn myself.'

Hermione, pink and clean, climbed out of the bath, and with her wand in-hand muttered a series of vanishing spells on the water that clung to the tiles, on the spool of hair in the drain. With her clothes tugged on, and back inside her room, she dried her unruly hair with a jet of hot air from the tip of her wand—her hairdryer substitute—and then wrapped it into a tight chignon by the aid of a few sticking charms. She crawled to the centre of her new bed, sat cross-legged, waited to be called.

Hermione had obviously become rather adept at this waiting game, and she'd learned to use that time in certain proactive ways—the main one being reading, _of course_. Now, thoughts drifted to the seventh-year Muggle Studies curriculum, on which existed a slim volume titled _Minus the Mudblood_, _Minus the Muggle_ which Hermione had read in February, cover to cover, sat on a toilet seat in the Fiasco Room, in a single sitting. The author, Gerard Rosier, spoke at length on the issue of inserting muggleborn witches and wizards into wizarding society without proper introduction; he detailed the abject fear of a world where concerns over the preservation of tradition existed only amongst the elite, for it should be the concern of every pureblood wizard, well-bred or not. Rosier, though a pureblood, had found himself in the seventeenth century, with more debt than income, and sleeping on the sofa of an unnamed muggleborn wizard, out of favour with the elites. His book was, essentially, a writing-up of his observations—like muggles did after interrailing through Europe on a gap year, living off biscuits and good-will—and it was a damning reproof of muggleborns. Three days after an underwhelming publication, Gerard Rosier was found dead in Richmond Park, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans tongue, his hands a stump of palm. His horrific mutilation propelled the book's infamy: it was reprinted, revised, and translated into several languages—which told Hermione everything, of course—and it went on to spur the likes of Grindelwald and his followers.

The Muggle Studies curriculum left much to be desired, and the teacher Charity Burbage—no more than five years older than Hermione, and already a shuffling meek kind partial to crotchet shawls—appeared to Hermione to view the Muggle population in much the same regard as Arthur Weasley: a curious circus act. It was no surprise to Hermione that the curriculum was in such a shoddy state, given this widespread exoticism of the muggle populous.

She found it exceptionally telling that Rosier's answer to the problem of muggleborn socialisation—as it was seemingly impossible to stop the occurrence of muggleborns altogether—had been carefully redacted from all those translations and reprints; luckily, Hogwarts held just the original text, and if Burbage was to teach it at all, Hermione would rather it be the original version. Because Rosier, for all intents and purposes, advised implementing a changeling program. The Ministry should take muggleborns from the cradle and plant them in magical households. And, loathe as she was to admit, for it went against her pride and the very fabric of her being, Hermione saw the benefits.

She vividly recalled the image of Professor McGonagall in all her tweed glory, sat on her battered living room couch in mid-July breaking the news to her parents.

'Congratulations,' she said, beaming as much as the old professor could, 'young Hermione is a witch.'

'You daft woman!' cried her mother, at her feet. 'How dare you!'

And suddenly, between herself and her father, there existed a vacuum of space. At such news, pureblood fathers did not lapse into a brief and ferocious depression, mothers did not cower at the sight of harmless accidental magic, pureblood students absolutely did not have to hide their wands in old shoeboxes in a dusty attic like she did that first summer after Hogwarts. And Hermione, the muggleborn, did—at least at first. The experiments with her father were results of a concentrated effort to bring her parents into the fold, to have them understand the nature of the wizarding world and why it could use some of their inventiveness. She was making discernible progress, but it was slow going. And there were two futures before her, as she understood it: one, where her parents would accept her entirely and her magic become utterly mundane; or the second, where she'd disentangle and extricate herself from their lives and memories.

'Was,' she thought, hundreds of times since reading that book, 'the more ethical solution a changeling? Was Rosier right? How much pain could we have avoided?'

* * *

Hermione figured that it had been almost an hour since Snape had departed to make dinner, and given the piquant scent of stewing meat and garlic that was wafting upstairs, she assumed that he'd been successful in deciding what to make her for her first supper here at Spinner's End. Yet, she had been resigned to her waiting, and made do with listening to him move around downstairs; occasionally the thrum of his voice reverberated up towards her, and it took her a little while to realise he may be singing to himself, which she found inexplicably endearing. If he hadn't had expressed that she was most unwelcome downstairs, and if the floorboards did not creak so much, she might have had her ear pressed to the door.

When Snape called, with apparently all the irritation he could muster, 'You can come down now!' it had been almost two and half hours, and she'd been half drifting off to sleep, so jumped. She couldn't think of the last time she'd been so unproductive, and cursed herself for not going back up to the library and discovering what lay on the upper floor—she'd do that the next chance she got.

'Coming!' she cried back, and again felt a pang in her chest: homesickness. She got to her feet, slid on her slippers. 'One moment!'

As she made her way down the stairs, the scent of dinner churned her stomach, made her salivate. The professor was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, now down to just his shirt, though the cuffs were buttoned; little bits of pale-yellow grease speckled the white cotton, and he'd thrown a turmeric-stained dishcloth over his shoulder. 'Another rung?' she thought, and tried not to stare at the disarmingly human figure he cut.

He stared down at her slippers the entire time, sneering—lips pulled back over his crowded teeth—as soon as they were eye level. Hermione, of course, was mortified. The slippers had definitely seen better days, having been worn down on the floors of the Gryffindor common room and dormitory; she'd learned to sew just to mend the holes in the soles. On the bottom step, she could merely smile at Snape.

'Hi,' she said. He scoffed, though he was still looking down at the slippers; they were Gryffindor red, which did not help. 'Is dinner done?'

He turned on his heel without answering, and lead her out to the garden, via the cluttered living room. Outside, he'd laid the table, a round and shallow, pale-blue ceramic casserole dish sat in the centre of the table, covered. 'Those are the most nauseating articles of footwear I've ever seen,' he said, pulling out the heavy iron chair; it was more forthright than she'd expected, though he _was _Professor Snape. 'And you wear them, flouncing about in public, I assume?' She nodded, and sat down, eyeing the china plate, splattered artfully with blue ink. 'Of course, you do. And you've been mending them by hand, like some muggle twit, instead of a basic _reparo_?' She nodded, watching him sit opposite, laying his wand on the table. 'Of course. When you have the time . . .' The Time-Turner, which rested in the valley between her breasts, underneath her jumper, drew his gaze. 'Must you constantly wear that damnable thing?' he hissed, averting his eyes, conjuring utensils, and a cloth-covered basket.

'Yes,' she said, finding her voice, and pouring a shallow glass of pulpy orange juice for them both. 'I don't trust myself otherwise.'

'But you trust yourself to use it?' he said.

'Obviously,' she said, which he found infuriating, naturally, for she'd stolen one of his lines and delivered it just as well—or, at least, she seemed to think so.

'Meddlesome chit,' he muttered.

'Thank you, Professor,' she said, reeling at how she could so easily speak to her professor with such obvious insolence, but she could hardly help it. Was it really just this afternoon where they'd been on Hogwarts' grounds? 'And _am I_ to expect a constant cycle of insult and, well, silence?' she asked.

He glared at her, though it was evident his heart wasn't really in it: his mouth twitched, his eyes, though were intent on staring her down, grew crinkled at the edges. 'Let's not,' he said, in a warning tone, the slow breeze moving his hair about his face. 'This isn't a game you'll win, girl.'

She crossed her arms. 'I'm basically sixteen, Professor. Hardly a mere girl.' The glare she received in response to that particular response was rather more genuine; so much so, that she found herself physically recoiling at the open hostility he emanated. Hermione could sense his magical discharge pouring into the space between them, the taste like heady treacle; her own magic felt rather neutered and submissive in response, buzzing in her ears, tingling in the nape of her neck—symptomatic of her underdevelopment; had she been a fully-fledged mature witch, her magic would have answered and challenged such open intimidation, it would have warmed her entire body. 'That's enough,' she said quietly, 'I think you've made your point well enough, Professor Snape.'

In a move too quick to track, he leaned over the narrow table, tilted up her chin with the bent knuckle of his forefinger, holding it between that and the pad of his thumb. His hands were ice-cold and smelled of ginger. 'And what point would that be?' he asked.

'That I'm just a girl,' she answered, her pulse pounding in her ears.

'Do you feel you're _just a girl_?'

'No,' she thought, 'I don't feel like a girl at all.' But she could hardly divulge such intimate concerns; it was bad enough that earlier she'd all but confirmed she was a virgin, but the professor needn't know how far away from womanhood she truly was. 'No,' she said, 'I'm . . .' and she stuttered. Because what Hermione, in all her Gryffindor earnestness, wanted to express was that she was a witch, and thus questions about girlhood and womanhood were narrowminded and blinkered; they belonged with other muggle rhetoric she'd attempted to train her mind to disregard. Initially, Hermione had observed it in the way the pureblood witches held themselves, right then in that first year; witches like Parvati Patel and Pansy Parkinson, who sat with ramrod-straight backs, spritzed perfume on their wrists between classes, and still used a wand in First-Year Charms as if it were another limb. They were _born_ witches. They were witches who perceived the loftiness of their pedigree and performed accordingly. Professor McGonagall had not appeared on a doorstep and 'broke' the news to the Parkinson and Patel parents—it was observed, assumed, and unexceptional. 'I am a witch,' she said, as resolute as she could manage, wrenching her chin out of his hold. She handed him a serving spoon.

He withdrew his hand as if he'd been burned, and began portioning out what looked to be the most delicious-looking chicken curry she'd ever seen—the top dotted with sprigs of fresh green coriander, trim kernels of cumin, and ginger sliced into short slender chopsticks. The food at Hogwarts, she had come to understand, was hardly aware of anything remotely east of Norwich, which was odd considering the multi-ethnic cohort of Hogwarts students, indeed the United Kingdom; even pasta was a novelty and a sure-fire sign that the elves were in a most playful mood. The last time she'd had a curry was the Friday night before returning to Hogwarts last year, and that realisation almost made her tear up a little at the sight of the modest auburn stew.

After doling out their portions, Snape reached into the basket, pulled out a steaming whole-wheat chapatti, blooming with just the right amount of char, buttered on one side, folded in half. He opened it up, cradled it in his hands, and blew a small stream of air to cool it a mere fraction; then he tore it in two and handing half to her, the butter dripping down the side of his hands, narrowly missing his cuffs.

She took the bread, and looked at the professor, who appeared to be waiting for a comment—'Am I this predictable?' she thought. 'Thank you,' she said. He nodded, looking down at his plate, tearing off a bite-sized scrap of chapatti, dragging it through the thick gravy. 'I should have guessed, really,' she added, following suit.

'What?' he asked, the sodden bread at his lips.

'That you'd be brewing a potion.'

* * *

**Author's Note**: I am making up for my minor delay in uploading in a lengthier chapter, and homely goodness. I realise I am writing these characters, twisting their souls to my whim, but I cannot help to love their ordinariness.

Do leave me a review and let me know your thoughts. I cannot even begin to express just how much your kind words are motivating me to continue. At the very least, they let me know that I'm on the right track. So yes, leave a review, a follow, a favourite, and I shall be back with the following chapter forthwith!


	6. CHAPTER SIX - ROOM

**CHAPTER FOUR**  
**ROOM**

* * *

'What happened to your cat?' Professor Snape said, twirling an ornate silver teaspoon in a builder's mug of tea spiked with two misshapen lumps of sugar.

It was the morning following their inaugural curry and Hermione had woken from her fitful sleep to the sound of the shower running. She'd dreamt she was the mother of the Fates, skipping through a hot open-air market and suddenly finding herself trapped beneath a grey-haired man oddly resembling Professor Binns, the dull History of Magic lecturer—dull for he was a ghost, though in the dream he was decidedly more corporeal than his usual form. The townsfolk looked on with indifference as she struggled beneath him. And then, a low thrum of music; when she woke, she heard the professor humming in the shower, a sound amplified by all the tile in the bathroom and she found it settled right into the pit of her stomach.

The morning light streamed into her room from under the heavy drapes, and a quick _tempus_ charm told her it was just past six-thirty. When the professor left the bathroom, she counted to one hundred and made her way there herself. She stood for far too long in the heavy mist, staring at the bar of olive-green soap that rested in a shallow earthen dish on the edge of the bath, bubbles still alive on its surface, a little white from where the lather remained, a long dark hair imbedded in its surface. It took all the will she possessed to leave the soap where it was and use her own—it would be one infringement on his person too far if she started sharing his heady herbal soap . . .

'Miss Granger?' he said, thrusting a mug into her hands, snapping her out of the most perverse reveries she'd ever entertained, 'Did you hear what I said?' He clutched his own cup to his chest, burrowing it against himself. 'Or are you still half-asleep?' He dragged his fingers through his hair, curling one side behind his ear; he was dressed in black trousers, belted, his black silk shirt falling tucked around his hips: though, the cuffs wide and open at his wrists, dotted with half a dozen undone buttons, his collar open. The only time she'd seen him without a robe was when he duelled with that hack, Professor Lockhart, in the second year. This? Unprecedented.

'Are you asking after my cat?' she asked.

'Indeed,' he said.

'Professor McGonagall said she'd take Crookshanks to my parents,' she said, missing the orange kneazle dearly all of a sudden. 'The merepeople don't abide felines.'

He blinked. 'Pardon?'

She laughed, and walked past him, saying, 'It's part of my cover story,' she said, hearing him huff and follow. She'd spent far too much time dallying this morning, and it was high time that she go back to the library. 'I'm supposed to be at a summer school for extraordinarily gifted students.' she elaborated, taking the stairs carefully, making sure not to slosh her tea. She heard him mutter something that sounded rather like a derisory 'of course' but continued on: 'And it just so happens to be at the bottom of the Black Lake. I am learning the ways of the mermaids, and helping maintain wizard-mere relations in the lead-up to a top-secret event happening at Hogwarts next year.'

'And what event may that be?' he asked, overtaking her on the landing with a huff, and hurrying up.

'The Headmaster just waved me off when I asked,' she said. 'Though, there must be at least some fragment of truth to his story, don't you think?' Snape grumbled a noncommittal sound, and she lagged behind a moment, dipping into her room to fetch her satchel.

When she entered the library, Hermione made certain her eyes didn't linger too long over the vast tapestry, else she would waste another day staring at it.

The professor had already settled his cup on the desk, tapping his wand on the stray books which began floating, and sprinting off to slot in the vacant spots on the bookshelves, passing through the protective glass that parted like smoke to welcome them, and the last slim volume with gilded French flaps zipping like a snitch through the wooden gangways suspended above. Hermione was somewhat exhilarated at the display, which put the Hogwarts librarian Madam Pince's filing to shame; she, of course, had been around at the very end of the day, and had seen the woman slide the tip of her short pale wand across the spines of dozens of books per minute, witnessed them tiredly take up their posts on the shelves. This minor discrepancy between the two's filing efficiency, she figured, was because Professor Snape's magic was far more potent than Pince's, a bland observation on the surface, but it set her mind reeling.

'Professor,' she said, 'what affects magical potency?' He cast a look at her from the corner of his eye and continued on as if he'd never heard her, manually reorganising the things on the desks. It took her a moment to realise that he was freeing a desk for her own use, which she found unexpectedly touching. In the corner he placed a few sturdy-looking feathers tipped with steel nibs, a stack of loose parchment, and decanted faint jets of indigo, black, and vermillion ink from unmarked crystal drums into small wells. 'Thank you,' she said, settling her bag a few feet away from the professor. 'I'll just fetch my books,' she said, opened the flap, and stepped onto the ladder and into her bag.

'Fucking hell!' Professor Snape cried as she vanished, the curse at a volume which almost made her miss a rung. 'Just what do you think you're doing, Granger?' he yelled, his voice echoing in the vast space she now found her in, following her down as she touched the floor.

She watched him pass through an impossibly small gap in the centre of the vaulted ceiling, draped in swathes of the same emerald silk that lined the inside of her bag. Brassy limbs extended out from the upper rungs of the ladder, and wound themselves into chandeliers and lighting fixtures, dotted with the same ever-lit candles she'd seen in a fancy homewares store in Diagon Alley last summer. The floors were the darkwood herringbone kind she'd imagined, so reminiscent of her home and her Gryffindor dormitory. The space was easily twice the size of the Great Hall, roughly rectangular—one of the longer sides lined with empty shelves, the other panelled and empty—the shorter taken up by two vast stained-glass windows. One depicting Dante's Hell, with all its many levels and sinners, their pale bodies warped, their faces twisted in agony; the other twisted her heart.

When the professor stood beside her, he held the ladder in a grip so tight his knuckles looked like they might pierce his skin. 'You don't seem the type to have a thousand spare Galleons lying around,' he said, confusing her entirely.

'I have a . . . _modest_ account at Gringotts, sir.'

His dark eyes shot to hers, hand loosening on the ladder. He stepped further into the room, cautiously tapping his foot on the floor and it sounded back a hollow sound like he was knocking on the side of a vacant wardrobe. 'Unfortunately, Miss Granger, this is the sign you were swind—' His eyes grew wide, taking in the stained glass on the right-hand-side of the room, and whipped to the other left, the buttery light flooding in, casting a muted palette of hues over the floor.

When he looked back to her, from a few feet away, 'An Undetectable Extension charm,' Hermione said, looking around at the cavernous thing she'd conjured from the nothingness of magic, and wondered where on the scale of potency she would place herself—if it was a scale at all! 'I performed it yesterday afternoon,' she supplied, recalling how often these kind of charms slipped and reversed in the initial hours; if it held for four hours, then it would hold forever, regardless of whether the witch or wizard who cast it lived—she imagined a populated library bursting at the seams of her bag, exploding into the world upon her death, like a book bomb. 'O the carnage,' she thought, spotting the unruly contingent of her belongings behind her: the totes, now empty of her clothes, lay wilted, and her trunk with books splattered around.

**=/=**

Severus Snape had awoke that morning with his wand already in his hand and the thunderous peal of the milkman's float rattling into Spinner's End. What followed was simply the melody of industrialised suburbia: the chime of glass bottles landing on doorsteps, murmured goodbyes at the thresholds, the snare drum of diesel engines turning over and, given that this was a relatively poverty-stricken part of Manchester, the petering out of the mechanics, a misogynistic curse, a re-attempt, a success, a drunkard shouting expletives.

Over the years, his colleagues had attempted to persuade him to move to a magical neighbourhood—suffice to say, they knew better than to recommend anywhere as bucolic or hackneyed as Ottery St Catchpole or neighbouring Chudley, and Godric's Hollow out of the question entirely—but the idea of Hogsmeade was proposed a few times by Minerva and Flitwick, Mould-on-the-Wold by Dumbledore. And though the thought of owning a townhouse or a flat in magical London held a fraction of appeal, he also understood that should the Dark Lord return, it would be the first place razed to the ground and begrudgingly rebuilt to become the epicentre of depravity; not quite his scene—in adulthood, at least. 72 Spinner's End was his home, and it was _his_. Yes, it always took him several days to reacclimatise; yes, he would often wake as he had done this morning, wand in hand, at the sound of ambulance sirens or milk floats; but these things he could abide and would likely occur elsewhere too. What he couldn't abide were brazen infringements on his solitude, which made his current predicament a vexing one.

He watched the chit tidy her books away back in her trunk; the trunk in her bag, along with the girl, and him, and two thirty-foot tall stained-glass windows. 'Fucking magic,' he thought, 'and fucking Hermione Granger.'

'This'—he gestured at the room—'may almost give you a Mastery in Charms.' If they were in any place but his home, he may have sneered at her, stood silent, but here he would not begrudge her the compliment. Hollow floor aside, for a magically malnourished and underdeveloped witch to perform the charm so well . . . Even Severus Snape saw cause to congratulate her.

She smiled at him and mumbled, 'Thank you, Professor.' Hauling herself to her feet, she waved her wand to shoot the trunk out of the opening, and walked back over to him. 'It was my first go,' she said.

'Impressive,' he replied, nodding. 'If you were in any better health, you may have fashioned yourself an entire castle.' Granger giggled, a sound which only served to remind him of her relative innocence. 'And that may be the last compliment I ever bestow upon you, Miss Granger.'

'We'll see, Professor,' she goaded, and climbed back up the ladder and into his library.

Flitwick, upon seeing Granger perform the _leviosa_ charm so effortlessly in her first week at Hogwarts, had bet a semester's wages on the witch joining the teaching faculty as soon as she'd graduated. Trelawny, three sherries deep into dinner, had dropped her voice two octaves and remarked that the girl's future was as consequential as a speck of sand. Given that he did not make habit of engaging in such wagers, Severus had not commented all those years ago—though, in the weeks and months and years which followed, he would often be the first to bemoan her niffler-like enthusiasm for information. Flitwick's bet went unanswered—his semester of wages safe in his vault—because Severus, and the remainder of the teaching staff knew, that despite the unchallenged and pious regard in which she held the written word, if given a nurturing enough environment, Hermione Granger would _at the very least_ become a professor of Hogwarts—the best Wizarding school in the northern hemisphere; Headmistress, even, if the governors could be swayed out of their blood prejudices. Of course, Minerva believed she was destined for the highest office in the land: Minister of Magic, and no less. Except, stood as he was now, in this vast room, eyes flitting between Dante's blasted Hell and—beyond even his comprehension—some Flemish notion of Heaven which had reoccurred far too often as of late, Granger holding an occupation at all seemed far-fetched. Fate was preparing the chit for another battle entirely, and Severus suspected that it was very much in orbit of the black hole that was the Dark Lord's brand, burned into his left arm, growing ever darker by the day.

'That daft Sybil was right,' he thought, crawling out of her cavernous bag-room, and catching sight of her on the upper-level of the library, salivating over his pitifully modest collection of theoretical arithmancy. Ironically enough, it was his own short-sightedness that tampered, yet again, with Sybil's off-handed prophecy. Because Granger's remarkability did indeed depend upon that grain of sand: if it were plucked from a coast, she would amount to nothing; but if that grain was the finite kind, imbued with the most sacred and guarded magic ever known, and perhaps if the final grain was caught and suspended in her Time-Turner, then it would be another matter entirely. 'Inconsequential?' he thought. 'Unlikely. Pain in the arse, nonetheless? Odds even I would take.'

After she had gone to bed last night, he had returned here, back to this library of his, and resumed his contemplation over the tapestry. He'd inherited it a handful of winters ago, upon the death of the last heir of the Prince line, and it, along with many of the rugs in this room—they did wonders to keep the warmth in, make the room feel somewhat hospitable. Much of the furniture in Granger's room he'd been bequeathed like this, and whatever dark artefacts and useless knickknacks remained, were piled up in his Gringotts vault awaiting some future period of usefulness. Of course, there was no actual land or property to speak of. Prince Manor, like many ancestral homes of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, was secret-kept, and sold for parts, in the end—even the Prince Elves had been disbanded and sold to any family or business that would take them—all to settle gambling debts, dowries, and funerals. The tapestries, rugs, etc., were beyond even Borgin and Burke's help. Yet, this rough diamond that hung above his hearth—a scene which was near sacrilege to pureblood sentimentalities—looked to be another working of the Fates, or, divine intervention as the hapless muggles would suppose.

Granger floated down what looked to be his entire compendium of retrospective arithmancy, and he figured that the two of them had boarded the same train of thought. He went to his desk, taking a seat with his back to the tapestry, but now very much opposite the girl—a trade-off, which signified just how out-of-sorts he'd found himself, and she would no doubt note.

As he began to answer the piles of neglected correspondence which had accumulated over the weeks—mainly editors of potions journals pestering him about his forthcoming articles—, Granger made her way down, and set about fashioning an olive-green leather wingback for herself out of a stray bit of parchment. Again, this was magic far more advanced than she had any right to know at this stage in her academic progression; magic that, of course, she performed with all the mechanical and unfeeling gesticulations she'd learnt in textbooks. He felt her eyes on him, but he abhorred the thought of becoming some simpering fatherly mascot for the girl over the summer, patting her head and offering her a liquorice wand whenever she did something so humdrum. Truly, it sickened him. But, of course, being Hermione Granger, she continued to stare and whittle away at his patience. 'Is there something you need?' he asked, finally taking his eyes off his quill and parchment, and taking a long drag of his now lukewarm tea. She spluttered, her cheeks grew pink, fidgeting in her hideously attractive new chair. 'Insufferable know-it-all,' he thought.

'I . . .' she croaked, and cleared her throat. 'I just wanted to ask you something.'

'Oh?' he said, setting down his crow-feather quill.

'It's a favour, really . . . Whether you might brew me—or point me in the direction of—something for the malnourishment. I've been taking a half-dose of a Metal Moste Momentary every third day, but I'm almost out, and as you know—'

'Restorative potions take at least a week to brew,' he supplied.

'Yes. Yes.'

In truth, when he had popped over to the nearest corner shop for groceries yesterday, he had also apparated to The Apothecary in Diagon Alley, and put in an order for her near-useless potion. He had also asked the owner Silvanus Selwyn to order in a double-stock for everything in his storeroom knowing the girl would be raiding it in no time.

He waved a hand. 'I ordered a quart for you yesterday, which should last you until the end of the week,' he said. 'But I will begin brewing you something far superior this afternoon when I go to pick up the order – you will use that thereafter.'

'You've already—'

He cut her off. 'Yes. Dumbledore has entrusted me with your safety, and I have never made a habit of shirking my responsibilities; I will not start now. You cannot exist like this in my presence, Miss Granger.'

She leaped to her feet in an instance, and rushed over to him. 'Thank you, Professor,' she gushed, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. 'Thank you. Th—'

'Enough of that,' he snapped, making the chit jump and retract herself from his person. 'Control yourself, you sill—!'

'Will you stop that?' she whispered. 'Stop it!'

And now he was at his feet too, hating how she'd pushed him to it, how her abused magic tasted like sour iron, as if he'd stuck his tongue in a rusty keyhole—or, now that he considered it for a moment, like rancid blood. He looked at her, her purpling face, the way her shoulders crumpled inwards, the vein in her neck visibly pulsing. Outside, rain began to pelt the windows; up above, his charmed ceiling showed a second day of Scottish Highland storms.

'I will call you whatever I deem appropriate,' he said. 'Silly, even, if that's what you're being.'

Granger had the temerity to sigh. 'I'd hoped . . .' she started, and then shook her head.

This indecision, this lack of forethought before speaking, infuriated him further, and suddenly his hands were wrapped around her shoulders, shaking her. 'Just what _exactly_ had you been hoping for?'

She twisted in his arms for a second, her lips pulled back into a snarl. 'That we'd all been wrong,' she hissed. 'That you weren't as awful as we'd thought . . . That you may be _rational,_ Professor Snape.'

Severus released her and resumed his seat, realising his own heart was hammering in his chest. 'I simply ask that you respect my privacy and personal space,' he ground out. 'You are my ward for the summer, Granger, and as such I shall attempt to keep you alive, engage in any _academic_ discourse, and brew a potion should you require it for your task. Beyond that . . . ?' Out the corner of his eye, he watched her hand twitch. 'Beyond that, nothing. I am not your friend. Erase any designs you have upon my person.' He heard her scoff and resume her seat, and begin reading in a fashion that could only be described as 'affected'.

Severus picked up a quill and continued fashioning a reply to Messers Cape and Wormwood, editors of _The_ _European Potions Review_. They had requested yet another article from him on the accelerated Mandrake Restorative Draught he'd brewed last year – petrification reversal was a relatively unstudied and dangerous branch of potions, and word had spread that the Potions Master at Hogwarts had perfected and used a brew upon the students. Given that Severus had patented the potion and a month's earning had supplanted every galleon he'd ever made as a Hogwarts professor, it seemed imprudent to further entertain these venerable crooks. 'The audacity,' he thought, and bought down his ire upon them and several others that were attempting to take him for a fool. Back when he had achieved his Mastery, he may have made such mistakes, but this was almost two decades hence.

This amused him for a while: the methodical and melodic scratch of his quill, the chime of the steel nib against his inkpot, even the girl's noisy page-turning, her voiced sighs, muttered exclamations. It was not the kind of silence he'd been used to, but it was eminently preferable to the charged atmosphere of earlier. But soon, when his letters finished, and they lay before him sealed with Slytherin-green wax, he was thinking on Granger again, her book, his tapestry.

'Is it impossible to go forward in time?' he asked, trusting that in this, at least, she would know more than him.

Granger jumped, which he had expected, but it obviously annoyed him, nonetheless. 'I don't think so,' she said, tearing off a thumb-sized scrap of parchment from the corner of whatever she was working on and sticking it between the pages. 'No . . . It just hasn't been done – not that we know of.' Setting the book down, she scrubbed her face with her hands and yawned into the crease of her elbow. 'It is completely coherent with all known laws of physics, and many muggle scientists have devoted their lives to studying it,' she said, 'but there is not a single piece of literature on the topic in the magical world. _I have checked_. This leads me to believe that it's Ministry-controlled information, which is problematic.' When she paused for an interjection, and he supposed that his expression told her to continue. 'Because information and research should be classless and democratic and free for all to access and read,' she said. 'It is morally wrong for them to bar some knowledge, in my opinion. If the Ministry is hiding it, then I assume they are using it, which, again, is problematic.'

'Quite the cynic,' he remarked – though, of course, she was right in every way; he was glad the books were teaching her this much, at least.

'Well . . . in any case,' she said, 'it is slightly possible. You would need to either be travelling at almost the speed of light or beside a cosmic body with enough gravity to bend the fabric of space.'

'Is that all?' he said, even his mind struggling to imagine such a thing.

She fought a smile. 'It might literally tear your body into strings of atoms, but really, Professor, the more difficult thing, in terms of muggle physics, is going back in time, which'—she pulled out her blasted Time-Turner, and stared down at it—'we have _almost_ perfected. These are Ministry-controlled but they are obviously far more lax here if they are willing to hand them over to a fourteen-year-old. So, again, there must be _something_ up. I expect it has something to do with that stomach-turning flaw.' Granger ran her fingers over the hourglass and shot him a look. 'Was there a reason why you asked?'

'Yes,' he said, getting to his feet, and beginning to pace the width of the room. 'You say that you found that book from the future. A future almost six years from now, seven from when you received the book. You would be—what? Twenty-three? Older, if you keep Turning and reliving the same godforsaken day. Which means, unless you find a way to move forward in time, there is an older version of you here in this present moment, stuck. And she will be _at the very least_ thirty years of age before catching up with herself. That is why I ask, Granger.' He stopped and turned to the girl, who was simply smiling at him like the infuriating swot that she was.

'Yes, that's correct,' she said. 'It took me a few weeks to realise this – hence my research into the future. Unless we find a way to break into the Time Room itself and uncover research that may or may not exist, it seems an impossibility. Even my most conservative estimates have me at thirty-four years-old in 2006.'

Should he survive the imminent rise of the Dark Lord—as much of an improbability as Granger's infiltration of the Department of Mysteries—Severus would be forty-six, and less than a decade older than her. This, more than any word exchanged today, was the most shocking of all revelations. Hermione Granger would, in 2006, may perhaps be as old as he was now. And since he was a red-bloodied male, after all, Severus couldn't help but soon think of the kind of wizard she'd be taking to bed, whether she may have time for her no-longer-so-old professor . . .

Severus wandlessly summoned his robes and frock coat which materialised around his shoulders, picked up his pile of outgoing post, announced, 'I am going to send these off.' And he promptly apparated.

* * *

** Author's Note**: Hello wonderful readers! I had really been in two minds about whether to continue this story at all, but in the past couple of weeks received many a PM asking whether I had made it through one of the most difficult times in recent memory. This update is to say, yes, though, scarcely. I caught COVID-19 in March, and was admitted to hospital for many weeks, recovering – I'm still in a fairly shoddy state, but doing much better. We all know people who haven't been so fortunate; my heart goes out to them, and you - on the whole, not a great time to be alive.

I'm going to try my hardest to continue with this story, but I've half a dozen other projects on the go at the moment so do bear with. Thank you for reading, and, as always, do leave a review and let me know your thoughts. I cannot even begin to express just how much your kind words are motivating me. I shall update as soon as I can 3


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